Collections drying up? 4 4

[Artboy99]

2 minutes ago, Aweandlorder said:

Do you remember off the top of your head what kinda books he had on the first visit? 

sure, what you see in the pictures. There was nothing left for key books unless the origin of Kid Colt in Kid Colt #11 is a key .

Edited June 9, 2017 by Artboy99

[Aweandlorder]

This is the part Im having hard time understanding... 

6 hours ago, Artboy99 said:

When we first heard of this collection the price was $200,000 for all 100,000 books. We didn't give it much thought at that time as it was an all or nothing sale. Turns out, over time the owner realized he was not going to get that price so he started to sell the books

When you first heard of this collection, didnt you go and check the books to see whats there? If I understand correctly, you missed the first batch since someone else was there buying some books from him already

[Artboy99]

4 minutes ago, Aweandlorder said:

This is the part Im having hard time understanding... 

When you first heard of this collection, didnt you go and check the books to see whats there? If I understand correctly, you missed the first batch since someone else was there buying some books from him already

it was an all or nothing purchase. In contact with him he was adamant that he didn't want to be cherry picked and you had to buy it all, I don't have $200,000 dollars so I didn't want to waste my time.

You have a good point though, and it was a learning experience: we should have gone and looked at it anyways.  It ended up he was asking $200,000 for his 100 longs so it was actually quite worse of a deal.

In the end, someone did go and look at it, and whether it was the first person to do so or someone after, the owner did relent and decide to sell it piece by piece. Had we gone and looked at it in the first place maybe it could have been us who got the fantastic deals. Oh well, live and learn.

[Aweandlorder]

6 minutes ago, Artboy99 said:

it was an all or nothing purchase. In contact with him he was adamant that he didn't want to be cherry picked and you had to buy it all, I don't have $200,000 dollars so I didn't want to waste my time.

You have a good point though, and it was a learning experience: we should have gone and looked at it anyways.  It ended up he was asking $200,000 for his 100 longs so it was actually quite worse of a deal.

In the end, someone did go and look at it, and whether it was the first person to do so or someone after, the owner did relent and decide to sell it piece by piece. Had we gone and looked at it in the first place maybe it could have been us who got the fantastic deals. Oh well, live and learn.

Maybe or maybe not. But never hurts to inspect.

Just my opinion; when a guy asks for (impersonating Dr Evil) "$200,000" for a collection, he is probably clueless. Not to suggest hes not an avid reader/collector, but simply clueless with prices. He wanted to protect his investment and shot you a ridiculous number assuming you will negotiate upon seeing the collection. I'd take a drive and check the books and bring him back to reality.

Would def be interesting to find out what he had, but hey, happens and theres always the next one 

[Philflound]

Despite the fact of Overstreet putting higher values for GD and VG for mid to late 60s Marvels and DC, these are available by the ton. There is no shortage of pretty much any of these books, especially in low to midgrade.  I think for the most part it isn't worth the effort of most dealers to bring lower priced books to cons. The return isn't worth lugging and using up valuable booth space. I saw a lot of $5 boxes at C2E2, so I think at least at major cons, that will be the lower sale boxes for most dealers.

[Hamlet]

1 hour ago, Philflound said:

Despite the fact of Overstreet putting higher values for GD and VG for mid to late 60s Marvels and DC, these are available by the ton. There is no shortage of pretty much any of these books, especially in low to midgrade.  I think for the most part it isn't worth the effort of most dealers to bring lower priced books to cons. The return isn't worth lugging and using up valuable booth space. I saw a lot of $5 boxes at C2E2, so I think at least at major cons, that will be the lower sale boxes for most dealers.

Smaller cons are the best place to sell stuff like this, IMO.  They are books that aren't worth shipping, but at a con with cheap tables they can be worthwhile.  

Stuff like this probably gets half my con dollars.  At the last convention, it got 100% of my money.  

I don't get to the big cons with crazy table costs though.

[thehumantorch]

4 hours ago, 1Cool said:

Knowing what you know now do you wish you would have done and looked at the original collection and maybe worked out a time payment plan for the 100,000 books considering what was left over when you got there?  That's 400 long boxes which would be crazy logistically but considering the collection had a ton of high grade key books would it have been worthwhile?  I know it's a bit of speculating since you do not know what was there for the 1st-9th guy but if you got those gems after all this time do you think $1.50 a book for 100,000 books would have been the way to go?  Just curious.

Originally I got an email from a LCS owner in Calgary telling me about this collection - thanks Mike.  Collection was slightly over 100 longs plus an unspecified number of magazines and trades.  There was a list and I looked at the first 10 boxes and his asking price of 200k.  I only saw about 10 books I wanted and assumed his price was unreasonable.  Contacted him and told him I thought his price was too high and that I would be happy to come over and discuss valuation.  Dumb move, always say you're on you way and see what you can buy and look at the entire list.

About 1/2 of his books aren't bagged and virtually none are boarded.  I'd guess there was 30k books in total plus magazines.  There are long runs of books in bags all stuck together so likely haven't been looked at in 20 plus years.  The guy loves Edgar Rice Burroughs and Westerns and War books and Dells but collected everything.  He also has a massive record collection, sports cards, books and trades.

He sold his key and high grade stuff for peanuts.  60% of vg Overstreet canadian for anything in nice shape and 60% of G Overstreet for anything low grade.  And he used a 5 year old Overstreet.  Anything that's appreciated in the last few years like Iron Man 55 would have gone for a song.  I think he's managed around $35k in sales so far and he's down to about 80 longs of old and worthless books and lots of newer $1 books.  I'd guess we would have paid 75k to 100k for everything and we could have done that without time payments.

 

[thehumantorch]

1 hour ago, Aweandlorder said:

Maybe or maybe not. But never hurts to inspect.

Just my opinion; when a guy asks for (impersonating Dr Evil) "$200,000" for a collection, he is probably clueless. Not to suggest hes not an avid reader/collector, but simply clueless with prices. He wanted to protect his investment and shot you a ridiculous number assuming you will negotiate upon seeing the collection. I'd take a drive and check the books and bring him back to reality.

Would def be interesting to find out what he had, but hey, happens and theres always the next one 

He had a complete list of his books.  He valued them at $400k and figured he was being reasonable asking $200k.  Many of his books had stickers on them with the near mint price and he told me he'd done that to come up with a value for his collection.

This is an old school collector, and a OO collection, he initially built this by visiting second hand books stores and from drugstores and later buying from LCS.  There are lots of books with second hand book store stamps - many of these stores I frequented as a kid - and there were lots of familiar LCS stickers on the bags.  Perhaps he was a file customer for the latter part of his collecting career.

I don't believe he knows or cares about grades.  He looks at a book, looks at the sticker, decides if the book is worth the sticker price and buys it.  He's ill equipped to sell his collection as he's never sold before and he values according to what he likes and not according to the current market.

[spreads]

39 minutes ago, thehumantorch said:

Originally I got an email from a LCS owner in Calgary telling me about this collection - thanks Mike.  Collection was slightly over 100 longs plus an unspecified number of magazines and trades.  There was a list and I looked at the first 10 boxes and his asking price of 200k.  I only saw about 10 books I wanted and assumed his price was unreasonable.  Contacted him and told him I thought his price was too high and that I would be happy to come over and discuss valuation.  Dumb move, always say you're on you way and see what you can buy and look at the entire list.

About 1/2 of his books aren't bagged and virtually none are boarded.  I'd guess there was 30k books in total plus magazines.  There are long runs of books in bags all stuck together so likely haven't been looked at in 20 plus years.  The guy loves Edgar Rice Burroughs and Westerns and War books and Dells but collected everything.  He also has a massive record collection, sports cards, books and trades.

He sold his key and high grade stuff for peanuts.  60% of vg Overstreet canadian for anything in nice shape and 60% of G Overstreet for anything low grade.  And he used a 5 year old Overstreet.  Anything that's appreciated in the last few years like Iron Man 55 would have gone for a song.  I think he's managed around $35k in sales so far and he's down to about 80 longs of old and worthless books and lots of newer $1 books.  I'd guess we would have paid 75k to 100k for everything and we could have done that without time payments.

 

Sounds like you guys took the right approach, 100k is a serious amount of money and if there wasn't a plethora of big key books the marginal return on labor gets worst in worst the more books you have......

[bounty_coder]

This is a fun thread!

[Von Cichlid]

I don't know.  This all sounds fishy to me.  How does somebody have something worth potentially 200 grand and their not willing to spend 10% (20 thousand dollars!!1) to hire a few muldoons to organize that 100 longbox collection to maximize revenue.  That's not just clueless about the comic market, that is clueless about money and allocation of resources in general.  Hell, for that price I am sure there would be quite a few knowledgeable collectors willing to donate a week off to the task.

[thehumantorch]

5 minutes ago, Von Cichlid said:

I don't know.  This all sounds fishy to me.  How does somebody have something worth potentially 200 grand and their not willing to spend 10% (20 thousand dollars!!1) to hire a few muldoons to organize that 100 longbox collection to maximize revenue.  That's not just clueless about the comic market, that is clueless about money and allocation of resources in general.  Hell, for that price I am sure there would be quite a few knowledgeable collectors willing to donate a week off to the task.

Yes, he did himself no favors.  But who would he hire to help with the collection?  Who would he trust?  Anyone he brought in could steal from him or lie about  value.  This is an old school collector who sometimes buys off ebay but probably has never hung out on a chat board or networked with other comic collectors.  

And the size of the collection works against him.  Too many books for him to look up and figure out values.  Enough books and tons of tough to sell stuff so most dealers don't have the money or space or inclination to take it all and push to cherry pick it.

It is a real collection.  I'm pricing the 4 longs I purchased right now.  Bought a stack of 10 cent Tomahawks and realized one was just the cover

 

[spreads]

8 hours ago, Von Cichlid said:

I don't know.  This all sounds fishy to me.  How does somebody have something worth potentially 200 grand and their not willing to spend 10% (20 thousand dollars!!1) to hire a few muldoons to organize that 100 longbox collection to maximize revenue.  That's not just clueless about the comic market, that is clueless about money and allocation of resources in general.  Hell, for that price I am sure there would be quite a few knowledgeable collectors willing to donate a week off to the task.

Who would be willing to do that?  You are greatly underestimating the amount of time and effort this requires....

Last year a friend of mine purchased a collection that had 20k comics, he solicited my help because they were all independents (non-marvel/DC) and not something he's familiar with (at least nowhere near my level of knowledge).  I did it partially as a favor and we worked out a low level of compensation in the form of some books I wanted to keep.

This took several weekends of my time, despite all the books being organized, we still had to go through everything - and unfortunately it was a massive disappointment!  I cannot believe how few books of value there were there (despite spanning all the 80s and 90s).  And this was just organizing, we're not even talking about the actual sales which would have been several more time multiples.

Second story....two years ago I met up with a girl that had a collection of '500-1000 books' (the story kept changing).  And after meeting her and spending time going through the collection, I realized for me to sell these books on her behalf - which is something I initially proposed - would not have been worth my time for whatever finders/seller's fee we could come up with.  And this was a collection of solid stuff, all silver/bronze, loads of low grade big keys....I tried to negotiate a sale but she was having a few people cherry-pick books and nothing became of it in the end. 

I couldn't even imagine how much work would be required for a collection of 200k comics; this is not something that can be done in a week, it would be many, many weeks (unless you plan on moving stuff cheap in bulk and then you wouldn't be maximizing return).  It sounds like these two guys know what they're doing, as I said before the greater the quantity of books - the less you want to touch it.

[FineCollector]

The only thing that scares me about those old bags stuck together is the glue residue from stickers.  There was a 1980-90's franchise in Montreal that put big orange stickers on their bags.  Fast forward to ten years ago... unbagged a few, and had a shiny square on the book under the sticker where the glue had gone through the bag.  They're out of circulation now, but I'll be sure to avoid any of those books that turn up in collections.

[Aweandlorder]

True story

this happened in 2014/5. Someone posted on Craigslist "free comics". Not the first time this happens, guy wrote he had a big collection and he's giving it away. I breezed through it and thought to myself gee, last time someone posted that I ended up logging 5-6 boxes of indie and valiant . Next

2-3 days later my friend Vince txts me (him and I are always competing for best finds, he usually wins)

"dude you're not gonna believe what I have in my van!!!" I says what?

"I got 3,000 books all X-Men Bronze including GSX1, Xmen 90-300, new mutants run including 2 copies of NM98..."

he kept on going through the keys I was already getting a headache. I ask him ok Vince cut the BS how much did you pay

he says $100. This guy was giving his collection for free... he posted an ad on Craigslist and I responded.. he just wanted to move on with his life (I think he was recently engaged or something but can't remember the exact reason)... when I saw all these books I couldn't believe it.

he ended up giving him $100 even though the owner insisted he didn't want a dime for it. 

This story ALWAYS baffles my mind, but it's 100% accurate. The books were all bagged and boarded in AT LEAST VF condition. But it taught me 2 things:

1. NEVER EVER LEAVE A STONE UNTURNED

2. THERE ARE ALWAYS UNIMAGINABLE DEALS OUT THERE. JUST GOTTA FIND THEM 

I've had my share of deals. Some were ridiculous, although never as ridiculous as that one, just because it was practically free  

 

[Quicksilver Signs]

The deals are out there but sometimes you almost have to be obsessed about finding them. Checking online every couple hours and being johnny on the spot. Going garage sailing all weekend, basically neglecting your family and friends. There are so many pickers out there, not jus comic flippers. Any normal picker will buy up comics and sometimes pay too much for drek. 

[Bird]

I bought some comics today, 40000. (Not really, only took home 1200 or so but the deal and handshake are in place for the rest.) The deal came about from me telling a lot of people, a lot, about my buying and selling comics. Then someone mentioned it to someone else who said "what does he like? I have 40000 Marvel from early 1960s through the mid 1990s." So many people didn't want to hear about my comic passion but if I did not tell them all then this deal would not have happened for me. It is a lot of money but a great deal all the same.

 

Edited June 10, 2017 by Bird
syntax. sinful syntax

[Aweandlorder]

8 minutes ago, Quicksilver Signs said:

The deals are out there but sometimes you almost have to be obsessed about finding them. Checking online every couple hours and being johnny on the spot. Going garage sailing all weekend, basically neglecting your family and friends. There are so many pickers out there, not jus comic flippers. Any normal picker will buy up comics and sometimes pay too much for drek. 

Depends on many factors. But it's true in regards to pretty much anything in life- it takes time to make money. Dedication.  otherwise anyone could do it

As u go along you learn the tricks of the trade that saves you time. You learn to search better. You familiarize yourself with good and bad times of year. Helps to know the area you're in.

Certain areas I chose to ignore altogether because the competition is fierce. Certain areas are a goldmine

 

[thehumantorch]

56 minutes ago, Bird said:

I bought some comics today, 40000. (Not really, only took home 1200 or so but the deal and handshake are in place for the rest.) The deal came about from me telling a lot of people, a lot, about my buying and selling comics. Then someone mentioned it to someone else who said "what does he like? I have 40000 Marvel from early 1960s through the mid 1990s." So many people didn't want to hear about my comic passion but if I did not tell them all then this deal would not have happened for me. It is a lot of money but a great deal all the same.

 

Congrats, that's a lot of comics.

[Artboy99]

On ‎6‎/‎10‎/‎2017 at 7:19 AM, spreads said:

Who would be willing to do that?  You are greatly underestimating the amount of time and effort this requires....

Last year a friend of mine purchased a collection that had 20k comics, he solicited my help because they were all independents (non-marvel/DC) and not something he's familiar with (at least nowhere near my level of knowledge).  I did it partially as a favor and we worked out a low level of compensation in the form of some books I wanted to keep.

This took several weekends of my time, despite all the books being organized, we still had to go through everything - and unfortunately it was a massive disappointment!  I cannot believe how few books of value there were there (despite spanning all the 80s and 90s).  And this was just organizing, we're not even talking about the actual sales which would have been several more time multiples.

Second story....two years ago I met up with a girl that had a collection of '500-1000 books' (the story kept changing).  And after meeting her and spending time going through the collection, I realized for me to sell these books on her behalf - which is something I initially proposed - would not have been worth my time for whatever finders/seller's fee we could come up with.  And this was a collection of solid stuff, all silver/bronze, loads of low grade big keys....I tried to negotiate a sale but she was having a few people cherry-pick books and nothing became of it in the end. 

I couldn't even imagine how much work would be required for a collection of 200k comics; this is not something that can be done in a week, it would be many, many weeks (unless you plan on moving stuff cheap in bulk and then you wouldn't be maximizing return).  It sounds like these two guys know what they're doing, as I said before the greater the quantity of books - the less you want to touch it.

And to add to the workload and cost: all of the books in this collection require rebagging and boarding. There is a significant cost to buying bags and boards for 25000 books. I am perfectly happy buying 1200 books for now.

Time: I spent 20 hours+ from Wednesday evening to Saturday evening taking my half of the workload of these books out of their horrible bags, coughing ( due to the smell as I am an asthmatic ) grading the books, counting pages, then rebagging and boarding and finally pricing them for the comic show this coming Sunday June 11th. I work a full time day job as well. I completed only 400 books.

Edited June 11, 2017 by Artboy99