Anybody Ever Buy Those "Estate Sale" Listings On Ebay?

I'm fine buying graded coins off of ebay but I draw the line there. Pretty much anything else is ASKING for trouble. Estate sale, unsearched rolls, unopened GSA Morgan's - all for suckers with money to blow. Stay far far away!

To be clear, I am not thinking about buying one; just curious as to what might actually come in one.

I have seen some ebay stores that do legitimately buy and liquidate estate sales... I have bid on a few, but always get beaten by the high rollers.

You are better off bidding on an Auctionzip site. There are a few auctioneers that do actually get coins at estate sales, and sell them, but their pics are usually poor, and the buyers premiums and shipping can run up the price.

I looked for unsearched estate jars, which used to be popular on ebay. This is the best I could find.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/US-COIN-COL...AOSwuTxWAPS0

There are pictures of jars, but the auction is only for 8 estate coins. I'd think they could do better with a BIN.

Here's one that sold, but these used to be a lot more common.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Old-mason-j...AOSwXeJYFoV5

When I first started collecting, I considered getting one or two of these "lots".

Looking, back, I'm glad that I never did get one...

I remember the huge lots offered on ebay a few years back by a few large sellers. Entire "collections" of tens of thousands of $$$$$ in low end coins hyped as the lifelong accumulation of a prominent doctor, attorney, or other businessman. The main seller offering these seems to have disappeared. It always seemed that these auctions never met their inflated reserves. I'm sure one could dig up a few threads in the archives about these listings with the right keywords.

Local auctions are better shots for estate coins than ebay, by far. These auctions are usually posted in local newspapers or (nowadays) online. This is especially true for court-ordered sales where there were no remaining heirs or the probate court could not elect an executor/heir to dispose of the estate.

In-person estate sales are a risk, most people who do estate sales for a living have "preferred" customers for certain categories who get early access to things like guns, sports cards, knives, fishing lures, cars, coins, records, books, etc. Those are customers who will always come in and buy the entire lot sight-seen or sight-unseen, avoiding the estate sale agent the hassle of having to tag and sort each individual item, and it often benefits the recipient of the estate sale's proceeds as well. This can make it hard for individuals not in the "group" to gain access to some of the choice items at sales. As an example, when I did the one for my parents' estate, the records, guns, boat, books, and sports memorabilia were reserved for preferred buyers (who were given early entry numbers) a week+ before the actual sale (the record buyer, e.g. paid $500 sight unseen for all of the records just based on a list.) This way, when the door opened, they simply walked in, picked up all of the items, and paid.

Most of the time when you see "estate" listings on ebay it is a scam, but not always. The key is to look for sellers selling out of their usual category. I've scored a few great coin deals from non-coin sellers who were either antique dealers, estate sale brokers/agents, "pickers", or people who were legitimate heirs of coins from estates and did not do their homework or just didn't care. Someone who's been selling nothing but clothes on ebay for 4 years and suddenly lists 20-30 raw coins without the usual keyword fluffery is likely to be a better shot than someone who's sold 2k coins in the last 6 months and doesn't touch anything else.