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Comments
I'm in Gainesville, less than an hour from you. I don't think I would be interested in the whole collection, as I don't have that much money/space, but if you post some pictures or a list of what you have I might be interested in at least some of it (particularly the customs you have). You might consider having an open house/garage sale type of event and advertise it in the surrounding areas. Ocala is a really good location that is convenient for most people in Central Florida.
An other option you might consider is one of the local flee markets. Ocala, Waldo, St. Pete, Orlando are some I have visited and have seen LEGO. I also have also sold stuff at the St. Pete market some years ago (not LEGO-related), and the booth next to ours sold LEGO and other toys. It was crazy how busy they were around the holidays. It may take some time to sell the whole collection, but you could hire someone to do it for you on the weekends.
One other suggestion; the BrickShow brothers are in South Florida, and they have lots of experience with selling LEGO at various shows, conventions and other events. You might reach out to them for help with selling your collection, or they may even be interested in it themselves.
;)
GLWTS.
Balancing the value of time versus the item value is the timeless struggle. Is it worth holding onto bulk bricks for years in order to scratch out a few extra dollars?
It is a huge load off my mind that the collections are now manageable and easy to play with. Our house has a lot more usable space and is easier to clean. And the extra money has made it possible to travel more often to places that are important to me.
My dad has a metric tonne of stuff in his basement. Tools, books, benches, pieces, parts, whatever - all related to his hobby. Worth thousands of dollars. It would take months to inventory all that crap, organize it and try to sell it. I don't have time for all of that. When the time comes - I'm not doing any of that. I'll go down there, take what I want - and make offer the rest up just as I describe above. It will be gone the first weekend it becomes available.
That's true, but it's also the case that for many very large collections, a significant amount of people's inheritance value can be tied up in the collection. A couple hundred, or if you're doing well, a couple thousand dollars you might be able to blow off, but when that number can start to be counted in 10s of thousands, I think the vast majority of people will have a much harder time just dropping it.
I mean, lets just consider a LEGO collection of ~1 million pieces, which I think most of us would consider large or maybe even very large. (Anywhere else they would consider it very large, I know :P ) Now, I found some numbers there were about 325-350 pieces in a generalized, random assortment of a pound of LEGO, and figuring a sale price of say $8 a pound, we can figure that, conservatively, a single piece has a sale price of about $0.0246. For 1 million pieces, you're looking at a value of $24,600. At the low end. (Probably the extreme low end.) Now consider the OP's collection, which has not only several million bricks, but also old sets, rare items, a large minifig collection, etc etc. All of those extra items can add hundreds of dollars of value over the plain cost of the bricks alone EACH. When they get added up, the difference in prices can easily be more 10s of thousands of dollars.
Now, for large collections, most people have some idea if there is real value in the collection, and everyone knows that loose bits in a collection are worth less than any sets of items that may exist in a collection. When you look at it like that, you have three scenarios: Give it away, sell an unsorted collection, or sell a sorted and orgainzed collection. If you're dealing with the kind of very large collection that OP is dealing with in an inheritance situation, you're talking about a lot of money that is just getting left behind for every step down from selling a sorted and organized collection. And again, if you can afford to leave those potentially 10s of thousands of dollars to rot, then good on you... but most people can't afford that. And so these large, unorganized collections can quickly and easily turn into a massive headache to deal with.
In your million brick scenario, you just make it someone else’s problem via an auction. Hire someone to inventory what you have, publicize it, and then run the auction. They take their 20% or whatever, cut you a check for the rest, and off you go without having done much work.
It is like i told the other poster in another thread. You can maximize sales revenue, speed of selling everything off or lack of effort in doing the sale. Pick any two, the third will be determined for you. In this case, “reducing the headache” means you are picking you’re maximizing the lack of effort to do the sale, by hiring someone else to do it for you. That is a cost. You can still maximize sales revenue, but that means it will take that person longer to sell your stuff, and there is a cost to that too.
1. I feel (possibly very wrong) that values may be highest now for many of the sets.
2. I love how many great builders there are, but in some ways this makes building impressive MOC's tough. I don't want to spend 5 hours building a tree. If I had the time I'd be up for the challenge, and I really think it feeds better building overall, but I don't have the time.
It's bittersweet for sure. But we've had a great run with LEGO. Won a trip to CA to WB, made great friends, bonded with my boys, traded our Batcave for an obscenely expensive car.... it just feels like the right time.
There's also the possibility that your boys may get back into LEGO at some point too, which may rekindle your interest.
Why not start selling the high value ones a few per week and see how it goes. If it is too much work, give up and sell the lot as a collection for a lower price than you would if it was individual sets.
Thsi is where the owner of the collection can help prior to their death, especially if they want their family to benefit from the value. Keep the collection sorted and rough ideas of values so that they are easily found, and the best bits sold off easily.
For me in the past, I've rented a table at a toy show and unloaded many things. Spent one Friday getting ready and a saturday selling. What was left went to goodwill.