‘Picker’ is a mainly American term describing
people who travel extensively to locate and ‘pick’ antiques and collectibles
and other very high value items priced below market value by inexperienced
dealers and collectors.
The majority of pickers resell goods to
private buyers, on eBay or other antiques or collectibles portals, often
straight from their own shops on or off the Internet.
So, for example, Picker A might purchase a
massive stamp collection and pay £20,000 for items he’d expect to bank more
than £40,000 from private buyers through several hundred eBay fixed price or
auction listings. That’s £20,000 gross
profit - which might take months or years to collect.
Such long delays between buying and reselling
stock explains why some pickers sell direct to the trade, at lower prices than
asked from private buyers, and in effect sharing their potential profits with
resellers. So unlike Picker A, Picker B
might sell his £20,000 purchase intact to a specialist stamp dealer for
£30,000, making £10,000 profit for Picker B and leaving £10,000 profit on the
table for the stamp dealer.
Picker B might make less profit per pick that
Picker A, but Picker B will work shorter hours and manage fewer sales
transactions, as well as recouping his investment and reinvesting his profits
much faster than Picker A.
Important
Haggling is common between trade sellers and
that sometimes finds pickers earning lower profits than they might otherwise
earn through careful negotiations.
This is how to get the best deal:
#1 - You
Open Negotiations
i)
Decide how much you would charge a private buyer and reduce that item by
ten per cent to a trade buyer. This ten
per cent represents the profit your trade buyer might expect to make later.
But ten per cent is way too low for many
trade buyers, especially those with high overheads, and that’s why you will
find some trade contacts requiring discounts of twenty per cent or even more
off market value. Where you suspect ten
per cent isn’t going to work, try the following method instead.
ii)
Determine the price below which you will not sell your item to a trade
buyer. When you meet, offer your
prospective buyer a ten per cent discount on your retail prices and sometimes
your contact will accept. Otherwise, let
the haggling begin and expect sometimes to bank more than your rock bottom best
price. Whatever happens, you should not
negotiate below your previously determined minimum asking price.
#2 -Your
Potential Buyer Opens Negotiations
Decide how much you’d like to make on your
item and contact several trade buyers to determine where your best offer
lies. This is a convenient way to
offload goods at antiques fairs and in antiques shopping malls where sometimes
one hundred or more dealers are trading in close proximity.
Move between traders, offering your goods and
inviting an offer. Make a mental or
pencilled note of offers and either sell to the first person matching your
required price or allow all to offer before selecting a winner.
Finding and Approaching Trade
Buyers
Now all you need to know is how and where to
find your trade buyers.
You do it like this:
#1 - Build
and Work Your Contacts List
Start today building a contacts list of
potential trade buyers for your acquisitions.
When you study top antiques and collectibles dealers on British and
American television, you’ll see most consulting their contacts books and
telephoning or driving to visit people they feel certain will buy their
goods. Do the same by recording names,
addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses for your potential trade
buyers.
Locate those people from antiques dealers
listed in telephone directories or advertising in newspapers and antiques
magazines. Pick up business cards from stallholders at flea markets and
antiques fairs, study specialists selling products similar to your own on
eBay. Wherever you see someone selling
antiques and collectibles and you think that person might require the kinds of
goods you specialise in you should add that person to your contacts list.
#2 - Sell
Through Specialist Auction Salerooms
The idea involves buying quality goods below market
value through salerooms located well away from major towns and cities,
including some lacking their own websites, and others selling mainly low value
goods with the odd really valuable item sometimes getting through the net.
Then you resell those low price and
potentially very high value items through specialist auction companies whose
staff do recognise the value of our items as well as having rich clients
interested in buying them. This works
like a dream, as you already know if you’ve ever watched television programmes
like Flog It!
To explain, when an item fails to sell in
whatever small, out-of-the-way auction saleroom the Flog it! team visit for their programme, you’ll frequently hear
presenters saying something like ‘Oh what a pity. It looks like the right people weren’t here
to buy on the day’, sometimes adding: ‘Take it to a specialist auction company
and it will fly off the shelves.’ Which
leaves me wondering why they didn’t take the item to a specialist saleroom in
the first place!
Cases in
point: Six
signed photographs I bought for £40 in an auction in County Durham sold for
more than £600 through specialist autograph auction company International
Autograph Auctions (IAA Ltd.), trading from:
Foxhall Business Centre
Foxhall Road
Nottingham
NG7 6lH
Website: www.autographauctions.co.uk
Moral: When you have something special, like my photographs
signed by King Edward VIII when he was still Prince of Wales, either auction
them on eBay or go to google.com and key something like this into the search
box:
‘art auction’
‘bronze statue signed
auction’
‘auction company sports
shirts’
‘auction classic cars’
That sort of thing!
Your search should bring a range of websites
to help identify your item and auction companies willing to sell it. But if all else fails, you can have your item
valued by experts at:
Value My
Stuff
www.valuemystuff.com
Antique
Vault
www.antiquevault.co.uk
….. or send images to the appropriate
specialist department of major auction companies like:
Christie’s
www.christies.com
Sotheby’s
www.sothebys.com
Bonhams
www.bonhams.com
Phillips
www.phillips.com
And that is it, just a handful of ways to
make a huge profit, fast, on valuable items lurking as low value goods in small
salerooms, or flea markets, or collectors’ fairs … not forgetting jumble sales,
charity shops ….. and so on.
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