The collecting world is starting to take Notice of US

From: jim stephens <jwstephens_at_msm.umr.edu>
Date: Tue Feb 8 13:50:45 2005

A professional appraiser or auctioneer may price a piece it can be for
sale, auction or insurance purposes.

In most cases these people don't want to do their own comparables or
experience on these estimates, but need a source to back up their numbers
so that people who are just totaling numbers can rely on them. When you
get an estimate from your cousin Harry who works for IBM on an Atari
800 because he is a computer guy it has about as much value as an estimate
without citations from these guides.

So as these are added, one can actually go to the bank with a computer
collection and get a real insurance policy on it, not a BS rider where you
have to have reciepts for everything (which will show you really did buy
that PDP8/e for $1 from a dumb swap meet vender) then have them tell
you after the fire that is all you get. You can show them the guide and
an inventory list of your collection and then get replacment costs. And
with a real agent, he will reassess this from time to time so that you can
replace it in 5 years after the original policy... or take the proceeds and
buy an new BMW.

and for auctions, people can go there, buy them and actually count them
as investment grade type articles and not have to buy everything from
the kids college funds or your retirement account. Remember that in
other collection items (not "collectibles", which are like Beanie babies),
things like some types of furniture may have fetched $150,000 for a
single 1730 chair, and now be worth only $100,000, so the values
may fluctuate as interest does. The good thing is that now we are
all sitting on collections that should only go one way in value and that
is up.

Bad news it that a lot of things which should be collected will now be
going to people who may not have the appreciation of the true
believer who is most likely on this list.

Jim

Keys wrote:

> While at Barnes & Noble the other day I found that collecting price guides
> are starting to list classic computers. In the COLLECTIBLES Price Guide
> 2005 by Judith Miller there were over 6 pages with photos and in Warman's
> Flea Market Price Guide 3rd Edition by Ellen T. Schroy there was a couple
> pages with photos. In the flea market guide it listed at Atari XL 800 with
> a value of $175, not sure were that price came from. I also found two
> books about classic gaming systems at the store. This is good but also bad
> in that it may take prices higher as people start to read these books and
> see some of the inflated prices.
Received on Tue Feb 08 2005 - 13:50:45 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:37:36 BST