Advice – Selling a complete collection

[Rob BoothParticipant @robbooth83957]

Up front I'd like to apologise to all forum contributors who must be sick to the back teeth of people appearing and trying to sell with their very first post. As a contributor on many other forums I know how galling this can be.

If you can bear with me though, I'm after some advice which would be very gratefully received.

My father passed away 18 months ago now and was a collector of powered model boats. He had somewhere between 6 – 10 boats (we haven't done a full recce. yet), destroyers, tugs, most of which are fully kitted and ready to sail, some which aren't He also had several controllers along with many, battery packs and spares etc.

My mother has decided she can now let his collection go and this is where my question or request for advice comes in. Can anyone suggest / recommend the best place to advertise these items to get the best price for my mother?
The problem is that we don't know what the true value of his collection is or what detail we would need to provide in any advert, we don't know what the technical terms are or what people want to know when looking at the advert.
Is Ebay the best place to put them, supported by photos or would an advert in model boats be the best place? The one thing we need to ensure is that they all go at the same time, it's going to be hard enough for my mother to see them go.

Anyway, if you got to the bottom of this post, thanks for reading. Any information / suggestions is gratefully received.

Rob

[Rob BoothParticipant @robbooth83957]

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

Hi Rob,

I appreciate your problem. One option might be to contact your local model boat club for advice (if you have one). If you can tell us where you are located we may be able to put you in touch with one. Did your Father sail his boats with other modellers – if so maybe one of them will have contacts?

Ebay is the usual route for sales but model boats do not usually sell as collections, people tend to buy those which appeal to them individually. There are also issues with packing the models properly as you will appreciate. Many prospective purchasers will not live within collection distance.

Members of a model club might well be interested in the spares and batteries etc.

As far as prices are concerned, unless they are exceptionally well made scratch built models as opposed to kits values will be fairly low, perhaps up to £300.

Another alternative would be to put them into a specialist auction but there are not many of those around.

Colin

[Rob BoothParticipant @robbooth83957]

Thanks for the response Colin, I appreciate it.

He did sail with a local club and getting in touch with them had crossed my mind but there was one chap, who was interested in the whole collection, who offered an insulting amount for them justifying his offer by telling my father it wasn't as if he would never sail them again so why would he care on the price. We aren't sure who this chap was/is but my mother would refuse to sell to anyone in the club on the off chance this man took them.

Confirmation that Ebay is the normal / possible route is good news as it's probably the easiest way to take this forward.

You're right, if I was buying I'd want to cherry-pick what I wanted but I'm hopeful someone will take the whole collection given what's there and the price they'll be listed for. They were all bespoke built as far as I'm aware, maybe one or two I've seen would be from a kit but I think my dad used them when he was only going to the club for an hour rather than the whole morning.

Thanks again!

[Ian GardnerParticipant @iangardner62867]

Hello,

I had this issue when my Dad died a few years ago and I decided to dispose of his collection of tinplate O gauge railway items and a collection of waterline ships. I decided the best way was to approach my local auctioneers and they advised me that they held specialist collectors sales from time to time. They took everything and catalogued the items- some four hundred ships as well as the railway stuff- saving me a huge amount of time. I was quite pleased with the results but you can never be sure whether the items might have made more elswhere.

I think people are generally reluctant to pay a reasonable amount for models, especially on sites like ebay, and as Colin says, you have the difficulty over delivery. I my experience, when a club member passes away, some folk can see it as a good opportunity to get a bargain but most decent people would want to see a modellers widow looked after.

Vectis are a specialist auction house but are in the midlands I think, so getting the items to them might be a problem for you. It would certainly be worth contacting your local autioneers in the first instance in my opinion.

Good luck with it,

Ian

[Rob BoothParticipant @robbooth83957]

Thanks Ian.

That must have been some collection your dad had, four hundred ships, wow! Fortunately we don't have that many to contend with though the possibility of letting an auction house take care of it might be appealing to my mother.

I agree with the Ebay sentiment, everyone wants a bargain and transporting such large boats through conventional means would, I'm sure, put a lot of people off.

Transporting the boats to Vectis would probably be cost prohibitive too but I'll look to speak with local auction houses. We're up near Newcastle Upon Tyne if anyone has any personal recommendations?

Cheers

Rob

[Ian GardnerParticipant @iangardner62867]

Hi Rob,

It does sound like a lot but they were only 1:1200 scale so a few inches long at most. I still have the ones my dad built himself at 50' :1'' but cant quite bring myself to part with those. I have no room to display them so they just take up space in my workspace in archive boxes. I ought to photograph them so I at least have some record of them- and then take them to the auctioneer. I thought about Vectis and may have got better prices, but sometimes you have to to think of the time and effort involved – and what else you might be doing!

It'll be interesting to know what you decide as many of us, as we get older, face similar issues. Don't forget, you can always put reserve prices on items in auction- but, of course, you already know that.

All the best,

Ian

Edited By Ian Gardner on 16/05/2016 15:01:37

[Rob BoothParticipant @robbooth83957]

Hi Ian

Aah I wondered how much storage space a collection like that must have taken up. Despite the mix of small and large items I bet it was still formidable.
There are a few boats that will be kept back and as tends to be the case these are the ones with very little financial value but which were his favourites.
I think what I'll do is take a lot of photos showing the externals and the internals of each boat and then all of the supporting equipment. I'll catalogue it, with my limited knowledge, and then list them on Ebay at a price my mother has in mind for collection only. If there's no success there then I'll suggest we take them to an auctioneer.

I will come back and post an update. As you say these are issues that most of us face at some point or other and if it can provide any help that would be good. I'm off on holiday tonight but I'll start the process when I get back.

Cheers

Rob

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

Master modelmaker Brian King recently sold his models by specialist auction. They were of the very top quality and you won't see better. Better than museum quality really. If you have a look at this topic you can see the catalogue and there is also a note of what prices the models fetched.

**LINK**

Colin

[Martin Field 1Participant @martinfield1]

Nothing special prices, wrongly described. Sounds like a typical auction house to me. Uninterested, lazy, incompetent and after all that they'd have ripped him off on some usurious commission. I was ripped off by Bonhams who took 6 MONTHS to settle and took all manner of stoppages off the measly price and they had the cheek to say it should have been in a classic car sale as nice model ships did better there!!

Put them on the forum first, ebay next and auction houses last, a long way back.

Martin

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

I don't think that is quite fair Martin. I had some involvement in the decision of how to dispose of Brian's models and the auctioneers went to a good deal of trouble to publicise the sale as much as possible including a full page advertisement in Model Boats.

Ebay is OK for relatively low value items but you generally don't get high prices, a working model from a kit will typically fetch not much more than the cost of the kit itself despite the work put into making it and the running gear with which it is equipped. Buyers on Ebay are generally looking for bargains.

The market for ship models is very 'soft' at the moment and has been for some years to the extent that high prices will only be realised for exceptional examples which come with extra selling points, builder's models for instance. or models with some sort of historical provenance or association.

Brian's models are superb and are of or surpass 'museum quality' but museums no longer want models in their collections or have no budget for them. Their attraction lies in the amazing workmanship he has put into them but at the moment this is not really taken into account pricewise. Leisure time spent building counts for nothing. The models have no inherent historical value so they are being bought on the basis of craftmanship and whether the purchaser is attracted to a particular ship. A lot will depend on who is at the auction on the day and whether people bid against one another

In the circumstances, the prices the models fetched were pretty much as you would expect given the current state of the market and that Brian wanted to sell them all at once rather than market them separately over an extended period in the hope of securing higher prices.

Yes, auction fees and commission are high but you know that when you put items in a sale and hope to offset them by achieving a higher price than by selling elsewhere.

Colin

[Ian GardnerParticipant @iangardner62867]

I agree with Colin. I don't think you get fabulous prices anywhere for models- certainly nothing like what they might conceivably be worth- and don't even think about totting up man hours spent in building and getting anything like a sensible recompense for that. You can't expect an auction house to do their work for nothing and, in my experience, they did a huge amount for their commision-sorting, cataloguing, advertising, actually holding the sale etc.

It all depends on how much effort you want to go to. In my case I expect I could have made more on my dad's models buy selling each of the four hundred individually (and that was only part of his collection) on ebay- but I have a life to live and preferred to let someone else do some of the donkey work! Plus you avoid the tyre kickers!

Ian

[Charles OatesParticipant @charlesoates31738]

I can recommend contacting Tennant's auctioneers in Leyburn. They are not too far from you and are highly respected, something I can testify to. They have had specialist model and toy sales in the past and will tell you when the next one will be.

Chas.

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