The Changing Philatelic Market Place

We have been in a place of the lack of raising catalog prices for stamps going on 10 years . I think many collectors have given up on the idea of "I need a more recent catalog set to keep up with pricing " we are also in a period of "who cares what new issues have come out in recent years ". Collectors interest is now about what changes and what new stuff has been added to the catalog section of the older stamps .

It is not only about catalogs but stamp auction firms also are changing how they auction off material .

I belive they {the auction firms } are experancing two major shifts in their business . First what to do with lots that don't receive any bids and the biggest change in bidding now has been active around the opening bid by a tick or two and the surprises of "bidding wars " pushing prices up is getting less and less.

With on line bidding and the many auctions on line the mind set of why bid up a lot ,better to just wait for the next auction next week .

The item that nobody has yet to discuss and never seen written about is what I call "then ten year older crowd " These are the collectors who are getting into the 80's age wise , These are the one's dying or getting to the point of not collecting any more and their material is showing up at auction . These are the guys who for generations build the hobby with their massive collections and specialised material . They are fading away . But there is no rush to buy their material because the next auction may have less aggressive bidders ,so I will hold off pushing up the price and hunt for a better price .

You started a thread on roughly the same topic, last year. Then, as now, it is purely your focus.

There are numerous examples of British stamps that were easy to find 10 years ago, but that I haven't seen in the last four or five years. So, the octogenarians appear to be buried with their stamp collections as the stuff just is not coming to the market.

If the stamps come to market, they have gone before you can contact the dealer.

You see auctions list nice examples of Penny Blacks that go far over estimate. Two years ago, I was looking at a plate 1b with four good margins. Like almost all Penny Blacks in the auction, estimates of GBP 150-200 were hammered down at GBP 250-500. The specific stamp I was looking at went for an even higher price than a comparable example offered by Stanley Gibbons on their website at around GBP 400. If I remember well, the estimate was in the low GBP 200s.

Another big, and somewhat expensive, online auctioneer had cycles of three or four weeks. 80% of Commonwealth lots were re-offered almost every four weeks, some for more than a year. It still happens, but it appears to be a less frequent occurrence. They do not re-appear even after months.

Totally confused with your posting .

This wasn't about one stamp and the price movement of one item , I was looking at 300 or 400 lots that was up in auction this past week and the trend of thousands of auction lots over the past year .

For example ----- With 975 people shot and killed in Chicago in the past year ,you can always find one city block with nobody dusted ,so things are not that bad in Chicago .

Yes, and as usual you are anchoring. Most big cities in the world are not Chicago.

IMO it is hard to paint the philatelic marketplace with one broad brush.

Auctions of large lots ala Kelleher and Rasdale have no relation to quality single and sets. Large lots invariably feed the lower end of the market. Watching recent sales at Siegel, Cherrystone and others of high quality and highly graded single/sets shows a tale of two (at least) collectors. One is being pinched by the economy and the other is doing quite well and may be looking for a place to park money. Add to this the hot/cold variables of different Countries/areas and you have a complex marketplace.

As for unsold lots IMO a lot has to do with the auction houses boosting their estimates during the COVID period when a lot of collectors entered/reentered the marketplace and not adjusting back to "real" levels once the feeding frenzy abated which I believe that it has. Kind of like companies that boost their prices to reflect energy costs and keeping them there when the energy prices go down. They see how much they can get for how long until the "squeezing blood from a stone" effect wakes them up.

Is this not relative? Can it not be said that 10 years ago there were collectors getting into their 80s? And 10 years before that?

In other words, the original statement seems to assume that it is only now, in 2023, that the hobby has more collectors coming into the 80 y.o. range than in other decades.

I have previously posted group images of the early 1960s APS show, the vast majority of people shown are older. I have been going to various stamp related activities since the mid 1970s and the only age related change I have noticed is that I have gotten older; everyone else has always been a majority of older people.
Don

Not sure if FloorTrader is focusing on large lots or singles, but I would echo Rogdcam in the observation that single lots do seem to be continuing to set new highs. In each of the Getlan sales at Siegel, highs were set for many of the private perfs on offer. There were at least a few of us who were very interested in the material. Same thing happened at the Schuyler Rumsey sale run as part of GASS last year. These new highs seem to be making it into the US Specialized catalog as well - despite the number of sales of individual lots being too small to really support huge price rises.

Bob - Same with the Adventurer collection that Siegal just sold. A number of sales blew past estimate and catalog value. One that comes to mind is a MNH US Scott 64 that sold for $26,000 against a cv of $14,000. It is a sellers' market for the really good stuff.

Siegel will be starting to sell off the Richard Champagne inventory (RIP Richard) at their next sale and it will be interesting to see what happens. A ton of group lots with nice stamps. The same sale has something like thirty-four Cattle in the Storm singles lotted.

Don --- Let me be more clear ,the old guys who are dying now are those who are the last generation of the massive collections and the one who had extensive collections ,they are the 50's and 60's youngsters who expanded the hobby into what it is today ,it is not as you say "we always had old collectors " This is the last generation of buyers who supported the hobby thru stamp publications ,stamp shows and those who sold stamp supplies .

The opposite is those young professional who run to Siegal Auctions to buy gems and maybe have a total of 150 perfect condition stamps in their safety deposit box ,a far cry from the collectors of the past .

The current APS demographics:

You guys are talking about 1% top tier material , your not discussing the steady flow of British Colonies complete sets that can't get 1/3 to 1/4 of catalog ,your not talking about the MNH album of Monaco that I bought at 1/10 of catalog . There is a whole world of 95% of stamps sales that are getting lower prices than years ago . The stamp world isn't made up of collectors who want graded stamps or encased stamps with jumbo edges . The stuff your talking about is not found in 95% of the collections out there .

I remember going to Kelleher in Boston and winning a PAX set from Switzerland for $180.00 and now it is for sale eveywhere at auction for $100.00 ,that was 15 years ago .

The saving grace for me is the steady climb of mounted collections ,I just started filling another set of Scott Internationals, the price are strong what use to get 5 cents X the amount of stamps is now going for 10 cents per stamp .

The biggest collector base has always been older folks, but the difference now vs then is that there always used to be enough younger people 'in the pipeline' - kids who grew up and set aside their collections, only to resume when they had the means and the time - to ensure that there was always an older demographic to turn to.

At some point - now? 10-20 years from now? - the 'current old demographic' will be the last sizable one, and the economics of the hobby will change significantly.

Rog posted the APS demographics, which I think speak volumes. At some point, membership is headed off a cliff.

People can argue the APS numbers don't hold much relevance for the future of the hobby as a whole, but few can argue that it bodes well.

Sure, there will be a handful of folks who pick it up because they inherited something, or came across a YouTube video, or whatever.

But the future of the hobby will significantly smaller and less organized, and that has material impacts on the stamp business, too.

I'm in my early 30s and have been a lifelong collector, and I can say with much certainty that people my age and younger who are stamp collectors are very few and far between.

The majority of folks half my age have probably never even used a postage stamp, let alone collected them. A stamp will have semiotic significance as a symbol for communication, much like the floppy disk, despite being obsolete for a long time now, still lives on as a 'save' icon.

It is interesting when you look at the APS numbers and see that over 90% of members are older than 55 and almost 55% of members have belonged for 16+ years. That means that a lot of the now older members joined in their 30's and 40's. Not exact without deeper data but close enough for this discussion. Then you look at the 7.5% for members under 55 and immediately see the change.

Of course, this is a snapshot of membership in a legacy organization that while in the process of modernizing their means of communication and trying to catch up to the digital age may not represent actual numbers of younger collectors that forego traditional groups. There are more and more YouTube and other social media sites that younger collectors may be aligning with. As far as auction houses go Charles Epting of Harmer always comes to mind in discussions of "modernizing" philately. Still have to think though that Harmer's clientele on both sides, consigning and purchasing, tend towards the older demographic. It always comes down to disposable income and leisure time and older folks generally have more of both.

Don is right. The problem is not that collectors are getting into the 80+ year old category. The BIG difference is how big the increasing percent of all the total collecting population is now in this group.

Don and I share the perspective of someone just coming into this age group. Folks, the majority of people who have collected over the years did it for the fun of it not the money.

Here are a few inchoate thoughts. (If I spent more time on them, perhaps I could weave a seamless web.)

I think it's always been the case* that 40-, 50- and 60-year-olds have come back to the hobby. They had exposure at a young age, and the spark reignites in some who now have resources. Not everyone, but some of them (and they have Platinum cards). I see the possibility that we're going to age out of people who were exposed to stamps as kids. We probably have twenty years for that. You old guys are covered for selling your stuff.

I'm still the youngest person at my philatelic society, and that's been the case for twenty years. I remember when the Woolworth's of days past had at least five running feet of display space dedicated to stamps. I think I recall it decreasing to a rotating rack of packaged stamp offerings. By that time, I had moved on to wanting specific stamps from the catalogues.

* "always" being the last 30-ish years.

COVID brought everyone back to hobbies for two years. Some of that will stick, some won't. I agree that we saw a bump in prices that has quieted down a bit. Everything went up; not everything has dropped as quickly.

Catalogues are playing catch up to the new normal. They spent the last half of the last century looking at price lists from major dealers, and factoring in auctions here and there, while sipping a gin and tonic. That worked, more or less, for their purposes. There was a seismic shift in stamp sales when everyone could become a dealer. Catalogues haven't caught up.

APS will be gone in 15 years, or will double in size in 15 years, and they won't know why. A current excuse is that the new generation(s) aren't joiners. Could be true. I don't think we really know. Vinyl records outsold CDs last year for the first time in many years. Now CD sales are reported as recovering. Maybe. I bet a Venn diagram of young people searching out physical media for their music might have some overlap with candidates for future stamp collectors.

Probably wrong. Regardless, my 2d.

Saw that one, very impressive. The Adventurer collection had some really nice items, I picked up a couple, including a US mnh 524 for $295 with tip, which I thought was a great buy. Ungraded, but minimum 90 or higher centering.

Listening in on the auction live, there were obviously some items selling high because of their rarity and low production numbers (special printings, etc...). Other items selling for higher than VF catalog value had potential to grade very high. Not sure if dealers were driving those prices up or collectors? Although, there were items cherry-picked from the collection and sent for grading as some had recent certs. Those items usually did well also.

In general, rare items or items in exceptional condition that come up for sale are somewhat insulated by market fluctuations. I'm into restoring 60's Shelby's/Mustangs as a hobby and the very high end cars do well no matter what. Simply because, like some stamps, there are very few available to buyers at any given time.

For all of the common items, in average condition, there's no shortage of material and as mentioned, collectors have many options for purchasing.