Questions for Doug Allen

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Posted By: Doug Allen

Hey Barry....let me respond to your inquiry....Let me restate your comment/queston in its entirety

Barry wrote.....But I do have a much greater concern, and there was one tiny phrase you used that opens a whole can of worms for me. You stated: "We service our customers...we maximize the grades." In theory, Mastro Auctions can not maximize any grades if the grading is being handled by an impartial third party. My question therefore, and it is an important one, is to what degree does Mastro Auctions pressure the grading services to reexamine a card when they are unhappy with the grade they receive? And to what level do the grading services capitulate since they are dealing with what is likely their number one client?

We can maximize the grades when it is a third party.....now with these comments rememeber for our company vintage cards are anything before 1976 so a lot of this will relate to early Topps and Bowman cards....here are ways we maximize the cards:
#1 Selecting the right cards to grade. With 50s commons going through the roof as well as high grade Goudeys, etc. it is key you identifify the right cards to grade. Case in point we recently handled a guys 1957 topps set in ExMt condition. His expectation was $5 to $7k. Derek Identified a dozen high number commons that were blazers and got them graded. They all came back 9s with two coming back 10's. We broke them out of the set, replaced them for a couple hundred bucks. The set still went for $7k, the commons went for another $6k...you maximize the grades when you know what to grade.
#2 As indicated earlier we employ techniques that have been found to be acceptable by grading companies and the industry in general. Case in point we recently handled a collection of Goudeys where the collector had inadvertantly flipped a corner when he put his high grade hall of famer in a CardSaver....we layed down the corner and it was graded a NM-MT by employing techniques that are generally accepted in our industry and by the respected third party grading services.
#3 Relationships - it is true that we are very large clients for both PSA and SGC but rest assured they still independantly grade our cards and unless it is a big raw collection that they know is ours the graders don't even know who owns the cards. On the other hand our team includes very respected credible employees which makes them take note when we do want to argue a grade. Actually it goes both ways. Earlier I used an example of a major grading service slabbing a card in a NM-MY holder that had a pencil mark. That is a card we got graded for our customer. We pointed it out to the grading service and cracked the card out of a holder....we are not in the business to sell over graded cards. This also provides us crediblility when we argue for a cards they seem to have undergraded.

Let me emphatically state that we have no undue influence over the grading companies.

Now that I went through all of that....in direct answer to you questions. A very small percentage go through the review process. I would say if we get 100 cards back maybe 5% of them get reviewed....of these cards. Of these ultimately a small subsection get upgraded. I hope that answers your question.