Price is Right

In recent months I've noticed that a high percentage of my email is from people asking me about prices.  Of course there are people asking me what their card or collectible is worth, but lately there are more people asking about prices they see in the price guides.  I wrote back in January about some inconsistencies in Beckett pricing for Ultra and Finest basketball rookies.  While still not perfect, I'm happy to see they are pretty close in the April issue.  This is not, however, what people are complaining about.

The rest of my email can be broken down into three complaints, Why is my card priced so low?, Why can't I sell my card for 40% of the guide price?, and What is my card really worth?  This week I'll see what I can do about answering these questions.

Why is my card priced so low?

A dealer said to me this weekend that he's having a tough week because his customers think he ripped them off with 97-98 Bowman's Best Basketball last week.  As he watched the wax price go up on the dealer market he found himself forced to raise pack prices to $6.95 in order to be able to afford to buy more when his stock ran out.  I told him that $6.95 didn't sound too bad as I had seen it even higher.  He told his customers not to worry because they would see some big prices on their good pulls.  This is where he got himself in trouble.

For some unknown reason Beckett decided that it was more important to get Bowman's Best in the April price guide then to get the prices more in tune with the current market.  This left the singles extremely low and many of the inserts well undervalued.  If they had even spent some time looking at their own buy/sell boards, they would have seen that the selling prices (and some asking prices) were much higher than the prices they laid out for their April issue.

This is only one reason a card can be priced low, but I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that a card should be worth exactly what you think it is worth to you.  This means if the price guides list your card at $30 and you think it's worth $40 to you then you shouldn't sell it for $30.  Hold onto the card.  Patience is a tough lesson to learn for young collectors, but an important one.  If you felt your mint Kobe Chrome rookie was worth more than $15 when you first got it then you should have held onto it.  If you looked at the price in Beckett and sold it for $15 then you've learned the lesson the hard way (as it rose to $400 this month!).

Why can't I sell my card for 40% of the guide price?

This question is much easier to answer.  Do you have a cool insert that lists for $300 in the guide and you can't seem to get offers over $100 for it?  Do you think that people are just trying to rip you off?  Think again.  What you're experiencing is the effects of overproduction.

Since I'm in a basketball mood this week (as I've spent most of the weekend watching the NCAA Tournament), I'll use basketball cards as an example.  Check out the Michael Jordan cards released in the past two years.  How many of them are valued over $100?  I counted well over 80 with a good number over $1000!  The same productions hold true (at lesser values) for all of the big stars of the NBA.  The result of this glut of high-priced "rare" cards is that people are unwilling to pay the high prices they see in the guides.

Once again patience and good decision making are the most important rule.  You pull a beautiful Shaq insert that lists for $400, but you can't get any offers over $150.  What are your choices?  Well, complaining about it won't help sell the card, so you have two options.  Sell the card and take the money and run (if you just opened a $3 pack of cards to find it then I'd go this route) or stay patient and keep waiting for a higher offer.  Once again only experience will tell you what to do, but if you watch what's been happening to inserts that are over a year or two old, you should have an idea that selling is usually the right choice.

What is my card really worth?

When it comes right down to it this is the real question we're asking this week.  If some of our cards seem way overpriced in the guides, and some seem way undervalued, then what are cards really worth?  I use four things for pricing a new card: prices of similar cards in recent releases, usenet postings, Beckett buy/sell postings, auction prices.

Similar Recently Released Cards

How would you go about pricing a Jam Pack Damon Stoudamire insert from Skybox Series 2 that just came out this week?  I'd look at the odds which are 1 per 18 packs and then look for a recent Skybox insert set with those odds that Damon is in.  I'd find Rock 'n Fire inserts from series one which has him listed at $5 and go with that.  Be careful when using this method that you don't look at a set that is much bigger or smaller then the one you just found or one that might be hobby only.

Check out the newsgroups for people selling (or even buying) the card you just found.  If you find your card for sale for $12, $14, $10 and $9 then you have a pretty decent idea of what range to expect your card to be worth.  Try to make sure you see more than one ad for your card before you make a decision because you never know when one person might put out a card at a wrong price.  If I added an ad at $20 or one at $3 to the above example prices you'd probably think they were mistakes, but what if they were the only two prices you found?

If you haven't joined Beckett yet then what are you waiting for?  It's free and it can be a great source for finding out what price people are selling a card.  Beckett has well over 200,000 ads online at all times and since it's real-time you can oftentimes find cards that were just released today already listed for sale. As with Usenet Postings above, be careful to find a few prices for your card before making a decision on what you're price will be.

Here's a method for finding prices that I believe Beckett and Tuff Stuff should take a closer look at.  When an auction is over and a card has been bid on and won this indicates a sale of that card has taken place.  These "prices realized" are often the best indicator of the true value of a card as it shows a price that someone was willing to pay for the card.  Teletrade offers a Prices Realized Index which is searchable to allow you to get an idea of what price your card could sell for if you decide to run an auction.  The other auction sites I list can also help, especially Ebay which is loaded with sportscards and is searchable.

Finally, as I close this week's feature, I'd like to ask you to keep one thing in mind.  Sportscards are supposed to be for your enjoyment.  Just because a great new card you found ends up being worth less than you hoped for, shouldn't make it any less fun to own.  Have fun with your collection and may the next pack you open bring you exactly the card you wished for.
 

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