Estate Sale Auctions - Your Experiences?

I don't know if it will make you feel any better but I recently looked at an estate with coins. I was doing a favor for a friend who needed help evaluating what they had. The collection was worth in excess of $10k. The vast majority was common date silver that was worth as much for melt as it was for numismatics. I did pick up a few key dates but they were either well circulated, cleaned or both.

I'm looking over another estate right now for the estate sale compnay I work for. I'm only partway through the collectiom but the vast majority is junk silver & cleaned coins in old style albums & folders. The better coins probably make up about 5% of the collection.

I stay away from so called estate AUCTIONS. Estate sales, if real, are basically just someone's household getting rid of lots of STUFF from a deceased relative. Usually most of the sellers have little or no idea of values of some or even none of the STUFF. However, there are even those where a relative is rather informed as to what items are worth.
Estate AUCTIONS are really different and in many cases just a joke. The last one I went to I saw a lot of coins, guns, etc. that I would have been interested in buying. Then I found someone I went to school with there. He was working for an Auction house. He told me how his organization buys everything and has a so called estate sale. The audiences are spiked with people that bid on anything to help raise the prices. His organization also buys up entire stores that are going out of buisness and then has those going out of buisness sales that sometimes go on and on and on.
All his info now keeps me away from AUCTIONS.
I've HEARD people say they got fantastic deals at those places but that is what they say and so far I've never seen thoes great, fantastic, wonderful deals.

I blame the internet for the decline of Quality items at flea market,yard sales etc...Before the internet It was easy to find rare items that the casual seller knew nothing about..But now everyone seems to be an expert on collectibles,because Info is so easily available.....Technology will be the death of us all!!

Our family runs live auctions, it's our experience that the family of the deceased tends to pick over the coins fairly well. Which I personally enjoy immensely because they usually miss the really good stuff. One family scraped up some corroded quarters and left the nickel book with key dates intact for example. Yeah guess who bought that.

Keep in mind most people have common coins, that's why we call them common coins. The bidding issue I agree with, people have no concept of value whatsoever when bidding. I sold some common provincial pennies from the 1800's in the sale a bit ago and they brought 50 bucks each, or roughly ten times their value.

Frazzle
Nice to see you so easily want to dupe the uninformed and rip them off..lol nice

I go to auction at least once a week and I absolutely love them. There are times where everything seems to go at premium and other times where you can find things at 50-75% of melt, a great deal in my book. Just don't let your emotions get caught up in it, this will cause you to over pay for something. It is easy to get caught up in a bidding war where you spend $1000 on a $800 coin. Take it easy and sit in the back and watch the action for a bit till you decide to jump in.

There are still bargains out there. Here are two from the past year or two.

I picked up a framed collection of silver half dollars at an antique mall for barely over melt (they hadn't adjusted the price in a long time). And I asked for a discount, and they gave me 10% off.

I also picked up several silver Mexican coins (a peso, and some smaller coins) and a Roman coin at an estate sale for three dollars. They were tossed into an envelope and held at the checkout stand. I think I sold the pesos for ten dollars, and I got $12 for the Roman coin.

The keys to success are:
o Look a lot more than you buy. Don't feel bad if you go to two places and don't buy anything.
o Ask. "Say, nice antique mall. Any coins around here?" A lot of the time, they are locked in cabinets, and not visible.
o Ask for a discount
o Estate sales: Show up early, and go straight for the glass case at the checkout.
o Take a smart phone with you, to check up on what you see. And a magnifying glass, and a flashlight.

They haven't gotten better.

There's no reason for a person running an estate sale to put out coins for general sale. If there is a coin collection of value, it will most likely be offered to a dealer/appraiser and sold that way, or kept by relatives.

When relatives of the deceased see a coin collection, they think "ooo, maybe I'm rich now". Almost nobody thinks, "Eh, throw it out there with the rest of it and see what we get."

Estate sales are great fun for more obscure objects, but not great for coins.

That's not to say I haven't seen coins for sale at Estate Sales for reasonable prices, but you have to go to like 20 of them before that happens. It's not worth 20 hours of my time to buy a couple coins for prices that might not be any better than eBay.