Comment by Steve Zarelli on January 20, 2014 at 11:25am

Those are pretty standard terms. It would be easier to make recommendations based upon the type of material you are looking to sell. Auction houses vary wit specialty. What collecting areas? What price range?

Comment by Dustin Jones on January 20, 2014 at 2:20pm

It's mostly modern sports stuff; single signed baseballs/bats, NFL game footballs and a few NBA game balls. Everything is pre-certified by either PSA, JSA, Steiner or comes with a player hologram. Price range wise we're probably talking between $100-$200 per piece. I've heard that sometimes stuff in auction houses can sell for very good money and then other times it slides through and doesn't sell for much at all. Any input on a good auction house to consign this type of stuff to would be appreciated.

Comment by David S on January 21, 2014 at 3:03pm

Many of the sports auction houses will only take items that are worth over a certain $ amount (Heritage will only take things over $1000).   Some of the smaller houses may take them, but you will have to wait around til they put it in their auction (some only have auctions 3 or 4 times a year, others have weekly or monthly online auctions).  Many online sports auctions are filled with forgeries so the sale price of the real stuff may be driven down.  Plus you may have to ship your items to them (pay shipping costs, insurance, etc)  I think you'd get your best bang for your buck on eBay if you listed it yourself.  There are ebay consignment stores, but they typically take 40-50% of the sale plus a minumum, like $10 per sale (approx 13% goes to ebay/paypal).  but you have exposure to the whole world and will get your money quickly. 

Comment by Chad B on January 21, 2014 at 7:24pm

In my limited experience the auction houses will still want to see images of the items you have before you mail anything to them. I doubt many would take a shipment of misc. items. Most would only take select pieces depending on what they think would sell.

You could try selling them on here but that will take similar work to ebay.

Comment by Randy on January 21, 2014 at 8:30pm

Depending on the volume of items you have, Premier Auctions Online may be a good place to start. They are based in Arizona and run monthly auctions. It sounds like the type items you have they do handle but they will likely want to lot items together to get to a minimum value of a couple hundred dollars. Not sure what their consignment rates are but if you have a lot of material they will likely work with you.

Pristine Auctions is another smaller auction house also in Arizona that will take items with lesser values as well. They run auctions every other week with a few thousand items in each auction.

Keep in mind auctions can be a real crap shoot and you can do well or get killed if there are not at least two bidders interested.

You might do better just selling the items in a large lot for a wholesale price. That way you get paid immediately and don't have to worry about getting killed at auction.

Most auction houses start the items very low to encourage bidding so you can never tell what will happen.

Comment by Dustin Jones on January 22, 2014 at 5:12pm

Thanks for the advice David, Chad and Randy. I'll take this all into consideration.

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