| I much appreciate the insightful comment and answers. To sort of justify my approach, collectibles are a field I transparently don't know much about, apart from the occasional and sensationalist press article. The article left me casually curious, and I was suprised to find no such comment here. Still, I really didn't want to dive into yet another rabbit hole, so this felt like the perfect task to hand off to an LLM to serve me a rough estimate. It's a niche of thought I've come to gladly delegate to an LLM, have it quickly google sth for me. >Sometimes the estimates are high, sometimes low; it just depends on the whims of the market. That's probably the nature of the business. But doesn't that mean it more or less evens out on average? I mean, you gotta start somewhere with an appraisal like this. FWIW, my experience with recent LLM models is that even free tiers are pretty capable of finding and aggregating information available on the internet, and doing some basic arithmetic with it. I may need to mention ChatGPT's answer was a lot more elaborate than the number I quoted. Possible scenarios ranged from a "conservative" $600k up to $1.5-2 million in the event of a bidding war between serious collectors at a premier house. And frankly, considering how naive the question is, I suppose that guess isn't much worse than yours or mine, isn't it? I understand if you don't indulge in this kind speculation, though. |
> That's probably the nature of the business. But doesn't that mean it more or less evens out on average? I mean, you gotta start somewhere with an appraisal like this.
Not sure, but yes it might even out on average! But that still doesn’t help you answer the question of the market value of one specific item.
One thing I didn’t mention is that there’s another factor at play in this specific case, which is that total the number of items (97) is likely as large or larger than the current number of collectors in existence who would actually buy them at current market prices. I’ve seen this before with other niche/high end collectibles. This means that if you put all of them on the market at once, you’re likely to crash the price of this item and possibly others related to it. So if you want to maintain the current price, you need to trickle the items out into the market slowly.
One thing that’s interesting is that the blog post just admits how many total items were found. This is information that collectors don’t always have in other situations like this, and simply knowing that there are 97 out there may be enough to keep the market price lower than it otherwise could have been. There are other items in this field (Nintendo PlayStation prototype hardware and accessories, first-run pristine sealed copies of classic games like Mario and Zelda, etc) where the total items in existence are thought to be in the single digits.