Tracking graded card prices

theplasticman · December 30, 2003 1:32AM

Would it even be feasible if some company came along and just did graded card pricing exclusively, tracking real sales?

Would people get into something like that? I think I would, just dont know how easy it would be and if it would make sense... thus people supporting it enough for it to grow/thrive/survive.

I think SMR doesnt cut it (in my opinion), neither does Beckett. In a perfect world it would be great to have a guide(maybe even a website)/magazine (some articles would be nice about graded cards, set collectors etc) that wasnt closely knit to a grading company.

If I wasnt so heavily involved in my own collecting, being married to my wonderful wife and trying to get my publicity company off the ground... this might be a reasonable undertaking for someone like myself (or some other highly motivated soul, haha).

For myself, I have a spreadsheet with my POP reports logged and pricings listed so I can see at a glance what stuff is going for.

Thoughts? Complaints? Solutions? Im sure this has been talked about before... but Im pretty interested in seeing some new ground broken.

Davemri · December 30, 2003 1:36AM

Davemri · December 30, 2003 1:38AM

I have thought about something like that and believe it is a great idea. I would definatly pay for a service like that

dave

spacktrack · December 30, 2003 1:45AM

It is a good idea and for it to work it would have to be someone's full time endeavor. Just a random search on eBay alone for 1971 Topps PSA resulted in 721 completed items for baseball alone. To track many sets for multiple sports would be many thousands of auctions. Then, to weed through all of these to see which PSA 8 are really PSA 8 OC, for example, and how that changed the price would be very time consuming, but also feasible I would think if someone dedicated the time to it. Also, would you track the prices of qualified cards? I guess you might as well while you are looking at all the auctions.

packCollector · December 30, 2003 2:18AM

It would have to be someone with a good network as private sales would have to be tracked as well. sometimes ebay can be deceivingly low or high. I agree smr is lacking though but it is tough to come up with a good solution.

are 1980 rickey henderson's which sold for 175 8 months ago really worth 350-400 becasue 1 buyer is buying them all up?

Vargha · December 30, 2003 2:31AM

For me, just doing it for one set is a pain in the butt. It would be a royal pain to do it for all sets and then listen to the crying and whining of "why am I being charged $10/month for this information?" Then, to top it all off, there would be about 40 total subscribers. Don't look for it to happen any time soon.

Fabfrank · December 30, 2003 3:02AM

About 18 months ago Ebay took a survey just for this service. I guess the response was not strong enough to warrant doing it.

onegaucho · December 30, 2003 3:18AM

I believe a previous thread mentioned something along these lines:

Link the thread (RE: www.truecardprices.com)

purelyPSA · December 30, 2003 4:19AM

A year ago I stated that I was thinking of doing the same thing...I estimated that doing so would take me 40-50 hours a week, and that would only be for 51-75 Topps sets. I figured that I'd need to sell 1000 CD's twice a year, each with 6 months of Ebay info on it, for it to be a decent investment. Even considering that I might get close if I advertised a little and put it on Ebay for sale, I passed...but I'm still kicking it around. I might try doing it myself for a month to see how feasible it is. It might require more than one person's effort.

theplasticman · December 30, 2003 9:10AM

it might work if a dozen or two people got together and took a chunk each. Hopefully something will come along. It would be cool to see what stuff has sold for in the past.

thefootballcardstore · December 30, 2003 9:20AM

Everybody go try:

True Card Prices - Hometown Sports

Just try it a month before your hooked.
One thing, you have to watch the way you search.
1970 Simpson PSA is a diferent search than 1970 PSA Simpson.

(We are in no way affiliated with Hometown Sports) Jeremy

See you at the Orlando Show!

purelyPSA · December 30, 2003 12:12PM

I'm also betting now that eBay has made the completed auctions accessible only when entering account info and not available to the "masses" that they might have something to say about people selling information gleaned from their auctions - they might try to claim that the prices are proprietary information and taking them and selling them is an offense.

thefootballcardstore · December 31, 2003 12:55AM

Should keep the lawyers busy a while. Jeremy

helionaut · December 31, 2003 3:35AM

Ebay is now in the business of selling their auction price histories. From what I understand, they are geared more toward business/industrial sectors, so if you want to know how much your restaurant mixer or backhoe is worth, you can find out. But auction results aren't copyrightable or trademarkable, so feel free to do it yourself.

Actually as far as cards go, if you want to know how much something is worth, posting a question on this board will usually yield a pretty solid answer if it's not extremely rare, and a fairly solid one even if it is. The collective knowledge of board members is a pretty good substitute for a single entity. But prices change so much and, especially with ebay, so radically due to a dozen unrelated factors that prices from 2 years ago would usually only be interesting in the academic sense, and not really useful in terms of predicting a current value. All it takes is two competitive people, or one willing to meet a high reserve, and prices can start getting skewed upwards. Conversely, a poorly listed auction ending at 3AM on a Tuesday could point things downard. And there are always scammers who could mess things up, with bogus auction results included in the record. All those details would have to be taken into account, otherwise the data isn't really understandable.

Tracking graded card prices

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