From An Estate -- So What?

nope, but some ebay bidders have more cash than brains, so they interpret "estate" as meaning "someone with lots of cash and lots of good coins".

While there MAY be a legit seller from of an Estate on e-bay here and there...for the most part I believe NOT! As I remember, we've had some members burned by e-bay sellers claiming to be "Estate Liquidators"..caveat emptor!

You're all reading more into it than there is. Estate is one of the highest searched terms on ebay, that's the only reason they put it there.

A few months ago, someone realized that if you clicked on the search box in the top-right of any ebay page without entering a term, that it would actually do a search for "start new search". They thought they were brilliant and posted this fact on a bunch of message boards. Before you knew it, there were 100,000 listings with "start new search" in the title. Now these people wasted 16 precious characters in their title thinking that people who accidentally hit the search button prematurely would buy all their stuff. Well, that's ridiculous, but they think there the smartest sellers' on earth.

It's the same with "estate", if they would put "coin" (which is what their selling, duh) they'd make a whole lot more sales.

You will never know what's in a hoard. Sometimes, you hear mad stories about how one have found a key date in a collection that a seller didn't bother to describe properly or wasn't too clear in the photos.

What can be possible is that in an estate is that it might be a "deceased" estate from a hardcore coin collector and their sons or daughters didn't know what to do with them. Quite likely - our collection might end up as such sales one day.

A genuine "Estate Sale" generally means the possibility of "antiquities". If an Estate Liquidator handles the sale then the chances are that the values are known and higher than a yard or garage sale type. I have a collector friend (coins) in his 80's that is considering liquidation of his collection before he dies as noone (left) in his family has any interest or knowledge of coins...sad but true. He does not wish to leave the burden of selling his collection to his "estate". If someone dies and there is no allocation for their coin collection then it is sold by guess who? That's one way that they get into the hands of greedy "liquidators" and possibly e-bay sellers. For the most part though it's sales jargon on e-bay.

I really have to take the cynical view that seller who claims the coin is from "an estate" is trying to make it sound prestigious or imply that the buyer might find a treasure at a cheap price, playing upon greed. It is like advertising that a roll of Indian heads is "totally unsearched" -- if you believe that, I have ocean-front property for sale, cheap, in Arizona.

Estate sales are the best place to find the first strike slabbed coins !!

Im sure that some of them are legit, but most are hyped key word auctions just as Bobby said,,

anyone searching ebay for coins should have a list in front of them for specific coins and specific grades, its far to easy to fall off the end of the board if your not focused.

Rick