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Rob D.About three years ago I started to get the feeling that the amount of quality memorabilia, aka "display pieces", offered in most major auctions was on a steep decline. My collecting interest -- Cleveland Indians memorabilia from the 1950s and earlier -- is somewhat specialized but nowhere near as much as many folks on this board. But like many of you, when you're searching for certain items, you can't help but take note of the market in general.
Anyway, the conclusion I came to is that, for the most part, collectors of memorabilia are more likely to keep items for longer periods of time than are card collectors. This is a generalization and certainly not meant to be an indictment against card collectors, but I think we see less "flipping" of quality pieces of memorabilia than we do high-dollar cards.
For whatever reason, I simply won't entertain the notion of trading or selling most of my Indians memorabilia, but as much as I like my rarer Lajoie cards, each one would be available for a price. Part of my mindset, I guess, is that I think there will be more chances to reacquire a card, but that's not always the case with tougher pieces of memorabilia.
Of course, markets are cyclical, and we might very well see a glut of nice memorabilia pieces hit the market soon. But I really do think that when a top-notch piece enters a collection, it's likely to stay there for a long time. One reason for this might be that memorabilia often becomes part of a collector's environment -- rooms decidated to a theme, something that's tougher (though not impossible) to do with a card collection.
Whatever the reason for it, like many have posted here, I was disappointed with the memorabilia offerings in REA.