What Would You Do If Facing This Situation?

My experience quite the opposite.
I had a running advert in a newspaper, drove 100's of miles
and every time, the responder wanted far in excess of my estimation.
I don't recall ever, an under estimated lot.

Well a little different situation, but.............

I am a member of a local stamp club that has a whopping 10 or so members. We used to have many more but over the years people got old, got sick, moved into nursing care, died or moved away. I am the 'youngest' in the club and I am not a spring chicken either!!

Over the past twenty years or so that I have been a member we get a trickle of people coming in to the club to see what their stamps are worth.

We even get a few donations too.

Over that twenty years or so I haven't seen once decent collection. By decent I mean a collection that has been organized and has a wide variety of stamps ranging from cheap stuff to middle range material or better in decent condition.

Most are, to put it plainly, crap or junk. Almost all have been stored in those cheap Chinese stockbooks and haven't been stored properly so you know what the result is: foxing, rust, and toning along with lots of stamps stuck together.

Prior to the virus hitting we did get two nice donations. Well, nice in the sense that they had lots of mint postage which the club was able to sell and use for meeting fees, insurance, etc.

The best 'collection' that came in was about six months before the virus hit with a run of Australian year books (some with multiple copies!!), modern Australia decimal mint and a range of common used stuff. The collector had to have spent a spent a bundle on the decimal Australian mint . I gave them advice that they should:

1. Use as much of it for postage as possible with a few exceptions for the best return.

2. Spend a little time and organize the material and add up the face value. There were books and books of modern mint including singles, gutter blocks, and huge blocks of stamps.

3. Then take it down to the bigger stamp club in Melbourne and either sell the mint for postage or put it in their auction to maybe get a better price. The used could have been put into the auction as separate lots.

What do you think happened?

We happened to have a visitor from another club who is a part-time dealer and after I talked tot them...........unbeknown to me at that time he made them a low ball offer that IMO was totally disgusting.

He got the lot for A$500 cash.

There was probably $2500 to $3000 face value of stamps or more in the lot along with that bunch of used material as well. The only reason I found out about it was that he was bragging about how much money he made off the deal a couple of meetings later.

If I knew he was going to that I would have had the club buy it for $500 or I would have made a better offer myself............

Totally ticked me off.

No good deed goes unpunished

You have learnt two things,
You are an honest, caring individual, (Big Tick)
and your part time dealer colleague, is a jerk. (another big tick)
to be avoided at all costs.

I worked for a dealer in the 1980's and when he hired me he told me to buy whatever was good that walked in the door at the lowest price possible. He told me to get a feeling for what the seller knew about the material, circumstances, etc. An heir that knows nothing about stamps? He's gonna get an offer that is lower than low. Some dealers are simply that way. Sad, but true. I definitely worked for others where they were a little more 'lenient' with the low-ball. In the end, no matter the dealer, there are going to be deals where he makes a lot of money and those where he will make little money, even 'by design'. Dealers will purposely pay one client more than they may pay another client (or, more likely, a stranger). Also, the low-ball is sometimes employed for a collection that the dealer 'feels' will have bad surprises waiting in the break-down. This kind of deal is always 'buyer beware', which also means 'seller beware'. Since the dealer knows what he is doing, it is on the seller to do what he can to get the best deal. If the seller is knowledgeable, he will go to a dealer that he knows well and will not walk away with the first offer if he feels it is a low-ball. A little back and forth will make everybody happy.

I would think that anybody thinking of "walking in" with material in this day and age would at least do some research for similar material on ebay or at auction or ask on a forum such as this to understand what the material is selling for on average or in general. No?

Obviously the pre-interweb days were different but that was long ago at this point.

rogdcam - on the one hand, I agree. On the other hand, there are plenty of people that don't do their due diligence. I suspect some people feel that their contact with the dealer is simply a 'reconnaissance' mission to find out what they have. Many dealers will see this as their opportunity to make the deal. Guy walks in looking for info. Dealer does what he does so well and buys the stuff on the spot. Guy walks out with money. Literally, waving bills in front of some people is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Some people simply cannot resist.

If the seller is the collector, or otherwise knows about stamps, the above scenario probably won't happen. Most of the people on this forum have enough knowledge that the low-ball isn't where the deal will end. If you know what you spent on something, and you are offered 1/10th of that, you will most likely simply walk away. If your HEIR gets an offer of 1/10th of what you paid, and doesn't know what you paid, he/she may be very happy with that amount. "Heck, this old 1847 stamp SET will buy me a couple of lunches at Maccy-D's! Now THAT'S a deal!"

But seriously, I agree. The internet is such a great resource for everybody for this type of thing. If only they would ALL utilize it.

If I didn't like the seller, I'd pay the $200.

So maybe I ran into this situation. I've mention before that I bought a large collection at a garage sale last summer. 3 big boxes full of covers, FDCs, stockbooks of stamps, glassines, packets, full sheets, WW and US. But it was a jumbled mess and wasn't clear where or how it was stored. The sellers had $250 on it and just wanted it gone. A quick look and I could tell there was enough material to make the gamble. Being a garage sale I leveraged my pissed off wife to talk them down to $175 and loaded it up. There's still stuff that I'm going thru but there was more in there then I thought. I have to estimate that the -book- value has to be somewhere near the $10,000 range. Wasn't too much in the classical range but just tons of material. Did I take advantage of the sellers? They wanted the boxes out of their house and the mess took months of quarantine fun to go thru. The sellers weren't going to spend their time sorting the material to make it presentable for a dealer to make a better offer. I know that when I go my wife is going to sell everything I have for a fraction of book value. I did promise my wife I'd sell enough of what I bought to make back the $175 (I don't want to part with the majority of it). I'm up to $120 and when I get to $175 I'll hand her back the money and tell her let's do it again.

I worked in record shops 35-40 years ago. The owner was a near-complete pain, but one thing we didn't do was con people. If you sold records to us, you were offered a price based on a proportion of what we expected them to sell for. So if you had an LP likely to sell for £1, you got 60p as credit or 40p in cash. The cash to selling price ratio was higher for good new releases, higher still for rare records. Of course, we made mistakes (in both directions), but there was no attempt to get good records for peanuts. That wasn't always my experience when selling records elsewhere!

"The owner was a near-complete pain, but one thing we didn't do was con people."

Unusual to say the least.

Ever try the 'honest dealer' test?

Years ago there was a dealer that opened a shop in the CBD here. I wanted to find out what kind of dealer he was so I put on some scruffy looking clothes and brought a couple of gold sovereigns to the shop........

The guy offer me something like A$100 a piece. Bullion value at the time was around A$400. Told the guy forget it.

First and last time I ever went there. The shop was only open for a short time.

Wonder why.....................

One of my favourite buys was from a man whose wife had instructed him to get rid of his old records. I took a quick glance at them and said that I'd have chosen the records instead. Early Motown and soul EPs and 45s that looked as if they'd just left the factory, plus, of no personal interest to me but valuable, the first pressing of the first Beatles LP. His jaw dropped when I gave him the price, and I had to accompany him to his car because he was worried about being mugged. The average Portobello Road-type dealer of my acquaintance would have fobbed him off with fifty quid.

Is there 3rd option, "argue with him till he sells it for 100$"? ;)
Honestly, I'll never know stamps well enough to spot valuable items, so I stay with my 2 cents max per stamp deals.

Probably the album has been stolen.

I had a friend that went to 2 or 3 or more auctions every week. She was an antique dealer, and if asked she would do a free appraisal of anything that she knew about.
Her specialty was PRIMITIVE Furniture.
She had many clients from Martha's Vineyard that were famous people. They would ask her to buy X or Y or Z for them and to let them know when she had made the purchase, they would pay her price and pay to have the item shipped to their estate.
As I already stated she would do estimates/appraisals for free. If she wanted a particular piece, she would put 2 prices on the post it notes that she placed on each piece that she appraised.
She would write in a loose leaf binder each item that she appraised and then give this paper to the person who asked for the appraisal.
I asked her this very same question about furniture. She said ethically if someone wants an honest appraisal, she would give them the true worth of the desk or chair or table.
But is someone wanted to sell it, and they said "I want $300." She told me too often if you told the owner "Oh this is easly worth #3,000, then she said the owner 9 out of 10 times would A not sell it to her for say $2,000 even though they only wanted $300. or B
They would think maybe it is worth more than $3,000.
She did say that if they asked for $300 she might throw in an extra $100 saying that the piece was in FINE condition.