New member intro, and a request for advice

[bnorth]

Originally Posted by Frankbrent

Greetings all,

Thought this might be the best place to solicit some expert opinions.

I'm (obviously) a noob here, but not to message boards in general, so I know that places like this are the best sources of info and (mostly) friendly advice. so here goes:

Outside of my early teens, I'm not a collector. However, my wife's late cousin most certainly was. When he passed away unexpectedly three years ago, among the possessions he left to my wife and I was an extensive baseball card collection. Based on recent perusal of some dealer sites (mostly Dean's), I'm aware of the potential value of this collection, and would be interested in selling it.

I've emailed someone at Dean's, who suggested I send them part of the collection for evaluation (none of the cards have been professionally graded). I'm hesitant to do so, for obvious reasons. I'd prefer to sell the entire collection at once, as opposed to piecemeal, even though I could probably get more for some of the more valuable individual cards. Unfortunately I don't have the time or resources to dedicate to such a project. Also, a portion of the collection was damaged when the climate controlled mini warehouse we were storing them in flooded (I dried the individual cards out, but they warped, and in the process I had to take them out of their meticulously organized folders - yeah, I'm still sick about all that )

Any way, tl;dr version - I'm looking to sell a large and very valuable vintage collection, and am asking y'all for help - any suggestions/recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!!

2 thing to the OP. Dean's Cards are highly overpriced and you will get a very small % of their prices for your cards. The other is take John up on his amazing offer.

Originally Posted by swarmee

Didn't even notice you were in Pensacola; if you need help appraising it and determining what to send in for grading or to sell directly, send me a PM.

[Jobu]

You know, Ben, they don't let just anyone live in Niceville.

I agree that you should avoid Dean's, post a little bit about what you have, and see if any one of the many respected dealers or collectors on this site would be interested - you will get good advice here and might get a a few good offers too.

Originally Posted by bnorth

The other is take John up on his amazing offer.

[mikemb]

I agree with the other posts. You will get honest advice and guidance from the members here.

Be careful about using certain sellers for sale prices as a guide to the worth of your cards. The only price that matters is the price paid. For example, on Dean's Cards, if you look on Ebay at the completed listings, there are 201,187 items. If you look at the items sold, it is only 1,732. Now I realize that the completed listings have some items listed multiple times over the period, but still, they are selling a very, very small percentage of their listed items. In other words, no one is buying at their for sale prices.

Mike