PWCC expands its lending activities

[Fuddjcal]

Originally Posted by Snowman

I take everything from Sports Card Radio with a grain of salt. Which is to say, I don't believe a damn word he ever says without actual evidence. He has repeatedly proven himself to be full of sh!t. This "anonymous" source is probably either some random troll from Blowhard or just himself making stuff up to get a rise.

I have first-hand experience with taking "loans" from PWCC (in my case, I wasn't borrowing money against cards in my vault, but rather taking an advance on cards I had already consigned for auction, but it's the same process). This is how it works. First, they appraise your cards and assign an insurance value to them. These values are always low. In some cases, extremely low (one of my cards was insured for $10k, but sold for $18k at auction the following week). If you have cards that you want to take a loan against, you have to put in a loan request for the amount you wish to receive. You are allowed to request up to 50% of the insured value for items in your vault, and up to 75% for cards that have already sold in one of their auctions, but for which you have not yet received payment (normally, it takes about 2 1/2 weeks to receive payment, but you can escalate some of those proceeds if approved - in my case, it was free of charge. I did not have to pay any fees or interest since my cards were already submitted to auction. However, there are fees if you just want to take a loan out on cards sitting in your vault, of course). After you submit your request, it then gets reviewed by a team of underwriters. They will typically send you a counteroffer for less than you've requested (so if you requested the full 50% LTV against the conservatively appraised cards in your vault, you will probably get countered for something like 35% instead. When it's all said and done, their actual exposure is probably somewhere around 25-30% of a card's actual market value when a loan is approved. Unless that's for a card that has already sold and awaiting payment, in which case they'll approve a higher amount as mentioned.

As far as a "bank run on the vault" is concerned, all that would do is cause a shipping backlog at PWCC. Even if they went bankrupt, everyone would still get all of their cards back. Unless they've taken loans out against those cards of course, in which case, PWCC obviously reserves the right to auction those cards to recover any funds owed to them.

What do you think about SCD talking about 30-40 people let go @PWCC tonight then? That didn't take long, LOL. Tomorrow, there will be a PWCC Vault run. We'll see. Won't we? Someone is full of Sh&*

[Lorewalker]

Originally Posted by Fuddjcal

What do you think about SCD talking about 30-40 people let go @PWCC tonight then? That didn't take long, LOL. Tomorrow, there will be a PWCC Vault run. We'll see. Won't we? Someone is full of Sh&*

If you mean this info is coming from SCR, I would not hang my hat on the info. Most of what I have heard come from this dude is utter bullshit. As intolerable as it is to listen to him, if this is from him, can you link it?

Thanks!!

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by Lorewalker

If you mean this info is coming from SCR, I would not hang my hat on the info. Most of what I have heard come from this dude is utter bullshit. As intolerable as it is to listen to him, if this is from him, can you link it?

Thanks!!

He reluctantly gets kudos though for some of his card doctor nicknames.

[Lorewalker]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

He reluctantly gets kudos though for some of his card doctor nicknames.

Some of the stuff he says on his show in total seriousness is likely more hilarious than the card doctor nicknames.

[Snowman]

SCR literally called people "card molesters" for wiping fingerprint smudges off of modern chrome cards.

[Fuddjcal]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

He reluctantly gets kudos though for some of his card doctor nicknames.

Full Disclosure... I've helped him with a few

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by Fuddjcal

What do you think about SCD talking about 30-40 people let go @PWCC tonight then? That didn't take long, LOL. Tomorrow, there will be a PWCC Vault run. We'll see. Won't we? Someone is full of Sh&*

Link?

I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I personally know multiple people who were recently hired at PWCC. So it seems odd if true.

[philo98]

Originally Posted by Snowman

Link?

I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I personally know multiple people who were recently hired at PWCC. So it seems odd if true.

If you use LinkedIn just search for Pwcc. There are a number of posts related to workers being laid off. I’ve seen numbers between 30-40. I tried to attach one screenshot.

[savedfrommyspokes]

Originally Posted by Snowman

Link?

I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I personally know multiple people who were recently hired at PWCC. So it seems odd if true.

Below is the post found on Linkedin from a now former employee.

About a year ago I went to the PWCC page on linkedin and there were 40-50 employees listed on their business page. I checked this morning and there were (still) 100+ employees listed. Some of them working remotely (likely the reason for the zoom dismissal) and numerous hired in the past 8-10 months. There were a number of category specialists hired in the past year in areas such as comics, memorabilia, etc.. This hiring spree, IE too rapid of an expansion, correlates time wise with the $175 million fund infusion. Guess the money was burned through quicker than expected..

[parkplace33]

Any word from the leader of pwcc? He has been quite quiet for the last few years.

[Rhotchkiss]

Not all layoffs signal a struggling company. Many companies (multiple industries) hired rapidly in anticipation of growth that never manifested, and they are now laying off those people to right-size the company given that the growth came. Suppose PWCC was preparing for alternative revenue streams - NFTs, video games, shoes, etc. but the NFT market sucks, and video games have cooled a ton after a few big profile auctions (I don’t know about shoes). There is no reason to keep that dead-weight salary expense on the books, so you lay them off. That doesn’t mean their card auctions, market place, vault, etc are doing bad. It just means they don’t need the people they hired to serve collateral businesses that did not materialize.

I have no idea what’s going on at pwcc and if the above applies, or if they are having larger issues, etc. I am just pointing out that layoffs do not always mean a company is struggling. It may mean they have given up on some growth

[1952boyntoncollector]

Originally Posted by Rhotchkiss

Not all layoffs signal a struggling company. Many companies (multiple industries) hired rapidly in anticipation of growth that never manifested, and they are now laying off those people to right-size the company given that the growth came. Suppose PWCC was preparing for alternative revenue streams - NFTs, video games, shoes, etc. but the NFT market sucks, and video games have cooled a ton after a few big profile auctions (I don’t know about shoes). There is no reason to keep that dead-weight salary expense on the books, so you lay them off. That doesn’t mean their card auctions, market place, vault, etc are doing bad. It just means they don’t need the people they hired to serve collateral businesses that did not materialize.

I have no idea what’s going on at pwcc and if the above applies, or if they are having larger issues, etc. I am just pointing out that layoffs do not always mean a company is struggling. It may mean they have given up on some growth

right google and amazon have a had a lot of layoffs...they seem to be making a ton of money...once thing to layoff when making money, another to layoff when losing money such as First Republic bank etc..

[savedfrommyspokes]

Originally Posted by Rhotchkiss

Not all layoffs signal a struggling company. Many companies (multiple industries) hired rapidly in anticipation of growth that never manifested, and they are now laying off those people to right-size the company given that the growth came. Suppose PWCC was preparing for alternative revenue streams - NFTs, video games, shoes, etc. but the NFT market sucks, and video games have cooled a ton after a few big profile auctions (I don’t know about shoes). There is no reason to keep that dead-weight salary expense on the books, so you lay them off. That doesn’t mean their card auctions, market place, vault, etc are doing bad. It just means they don’t need the people they hired to serve collateral businesses that did not materialize.

I have no idea what’s going on at pwcc and if the above applies, or if they are having larger issues, etc. I am just pointing out that layoffs do not always mean a company is struggling. It may mean they have given up on some growth

Not knowing specifically who all the released employees were and what their responsibilities entailed, it is tough to say if they lay-offs were targeted at these expansion categories or not. The two linkedin posters who are known to have been released yesterday are essentially software engineers and do not appear to be associated with any specific category. However, this is only accounts for only 2 of 30/40 employees out at pwcc....it will be interesting to find out what some of the other released employee's responsibilities were at pwcc.

[glynparson]

Layoffs coupled with the news of them getting stuck with defaulted loans were the collateral is worth 1/10 to 1/2 of what it was when the loan was written. Does not seem like good news to me. I don’t get why some are always so quick to defend some of the people they do, it mystifies me. As for sports card radio please show me all these times they’ve been wrong about the hobby? I think they sometimes are jerks about how they say stuff and there politics are absurd but they tend to be on top of the hobby and what’s going on. I must admit I was shocked at how good KG was on the show last night.

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by parkplace33

Any word from the leader of pwcc? He has been quite quiet for the last few years.

Brent had a propensity for saying stupid things even though IMO he's very smart. If he's learned not to, that's a good move for him.