Posted By:
Mike MasinickHey guys,
It's been tried... with $20,000 cards. And it was VERY difficult for a variety of reasons. Our final few items from CardTarget.com are being sold at the upcoming Goodwin & Co auction. Once that is complete I plan on putting together a white paper about our business experience and lessons learned from this marketplace that I'll be sure to post here.
Bottom line is that at one point we had a $200,000 insurance policy on cards that were sitting in a safe deposit box that cost us over $3500 a year. We looked all over for a better insurance policy, but collectors insurance company was the ONLY company who understood that the cards would be owned by potentially hundreds of people and made us take out a dealer policy since their dealer policy is the only policy that would cover other people's cards in your possession. Those aren't cheap... and there is no break for having the cards in a safe deposit box (which we did).
I talked to at least 10 other insurance companies over the two years we were active and not one of them would even give me a quote for insurance on "shared" cards that were owned by multiple people (they might have gone for 2-3 people, but when I told them hundreds of people they all freaked out). Sure, you could always say that one person owned the cards, but if you're not doing your insurance 100% by the book, why do it at all? If they're not going to pay when something goes wrong because you lied about your policy, then there's no point in having insurance.
Anyway, I don't think it would be possible for a PUBLIC website or group to do a group buy of a Wagner without some very large name behind them (IE: Beckett) self insuring the process and guaranteeing any unsold portion. I think it would be possible if everything was done outside of the public eye... but I don't see it being worth it for the person running the show as there is a lot of work and risk involved and pretty much no reward.
Hope that helps, and let me know if you have any questions about how we ran our marketplace (if somebody seriously tries this in the future, let me know... we have the marketplace code written and it functioned for 2 years, it's just a matter of the logistics that we just couldn't make work).
Mike Masinick
mike@cardtarget.com