Is this really a buyer’s market?

[HistoricNewspapers]

Originally Posted by bcbgcbrcb

Good point regarding the weekly/monthly auctions at AH’s these days.

The hassle with the auction houses, I’m looking for a 1961 Fleer Oscar Robertson for under $1K, the best eye appeal example that I can find. First, I have to go to my AH list and search REA, then search Heritage, then Memory Lane, etc. endlessly. I would expect that very few would have one of these in their auction. If they do, every auction ends on different weeks/months, etc. With ebay, I can jump on there and buy one BIN in five minutes. So, the AH hassle seems real to me. Believe me, I did the stay up all night thing to bid on AH items countless times over the years until a massive heart attack eventually. While I certainly do not blame that as the main reason why this happened to me, I’m sure all of the sleepless nights certainly weren’t a plus for my long-term health.

One of the reasons dealers will mark up a card's price and hold steady because they did all that work for you.

[Jewish-collector]

Travis - Hell of a 1961 Fleer set !!! Rakosi would be proud of you.

[BioCRN]

Some of the search engines on AH have me spending less time hunting around in their offerings and simply doing exact searches for highly desired stuff then exiting.

They're slow, they spit out way too many results, the searches actively choke on results because they're trying to return results in real-time as I'm typing letter-by-letter, the search results seem to be optimized for phones rather than computers creating too many pages of returns...etc.

Compound that with the sheer amount of weekly/monthly auctions and the my interest drops even more...

[jchcollins]

Ebay and especially BIN's on nice vintage is usually a museum on a good day, and it's even worse now with the lag of the down market. I would agree that nicely centered cards at all grade levels continue to command a respectable premium. It's kind of like the economy as a whole lately - we've had some ups and downs but still haven't technically hit a recession. The market has softened in that lower grade raw or uglier for the grade graded might be reaching bargain status - but the really nice stuff continues to stay strong.

I'm lucky in that mild to moderate OC has never really bothered me, and I can pickup some deals because of that. (75/25 one way is fine, 90/10 probably not).

Down market from 2020, yes - but it would be almost impossible for it not to be. The fact that it's technically "down" doesn't suggest to me that it's in anyway unhealthy yet.

[rhettyeakley]

I haven’t noticed a dip in my pre- or post-war vintage (pre-1980) sales over the past few years honestly. In fact those sales have increased (but i have been listing more often but the sell through rate is pretty much identical). I do not sell my higher end stuff via eBay though and I only really do BIN there. My target price range for ebay has always been $10-200 as that what moves.

Conversely, Ultra Modern has been significantly hurt.