Million-Dollar Home Video Collection

Are you the guy selling them?

If he offered them for a quarter each then he has a reasonable chance of selling them, thus he would get $5,000. Of course there is a possibility for any amount to be paid.

Would be something like this:

$5,000 75% chance
$20,000 25%
$50,000 1%
$200,000 0.001%
$1,000,000 0.000000000001%

 

Those are on the DVR, and he refuses to erase them.

 

If I had a million dollars to waste, I’d hire someone to steal this guy’s collection ..... bwahahaha.

 

Oh for sure the effort put into the sale makes a huge difference in the final price.
I see this all the time with collector cars.
I play with Cobra Roadsters. Because of this I am constantly looking at various ads revolving around these cars.
Taking some time to take excellent, well thought out photos, give detailed information about what the car is, as well as proper documentation to back up what is being claimed, will pay dividends in the multiple thousands of dollars more earned at time of sale.

Some simply open the garage door, take a few cell phone shots, post blurry, non-descriptive images with very little verbiage and ask full price for the car...and they rarely get even close to the asking price.

I agree. If this guy takes time to carefully catalog and list all the titles. Highlight any significant collector pieces and showcase them, as well as aid the potential buyers in the logistics of moving the collection, he will almost certainly get a better price.

 

That is your assessment based on your value of the items being sold. And it is not wrong.
Just because it is not wrong does not make it the only possible outcome.

Your value is not another persons value. For instance, my friends daughter amassed a HUGE collection of a certain brand of stuffed animals. In my value the whole collection would be worth about $25 (I think there were about 200 of them)
A person on the internet payed a very tidy sum for the collection and payed huge money for a few of the ultra rare and excellent pieces.
I am talking in excess of $1000.
My value system is certainly not the same as the guy who payed for the collection.
This means me making a value judgement on those items would have been terribly low as compared to what was actually payed.

You never know until the sale is final.

The same applies here. In your value system you value each piece at around $5. If the seller is willing to take your offer then it is a good sale because both parties agreed on a price.
If that price goes well above what you value the items to be it does not make the sale any less worthy between the buyer and seller.

Their personal value system is different than yours...and that is okay.

 

ok then

 

Sounds like a bargain if you are a retail store and have the time and energy to put into selling them. For everyone else, pass.

 

If you look at his listing then you would see he had worked in a pawn shop for 10 years. If he owned the shop, then he probably paid pennies on the Dollar. He's also selling them off one by one. $1m is the price for what's left. These may be unsold stock from his pawn shop for all we know.

 

The thing is you are comparing apples and oranges. Everyone knows there are collectors for things like certain stuffed toys, die-cast cars, baseball cards etc, that will pay good money for collections and rare items.

It is not the same with films and music as people are consuming these things differently now and they don't need physical copies. They are streaming and downloading. People collect films and music on iTunes. You can't collect Beanie Babies or Dinky cars like that.

Sure there are still collectors of physical media and rare items do fetch money. Vinyl obviously. But CD's and DVD's/BR are not like vinyl. 99% of CD's/DVD's and Blu Rays are either worthless or at most worth a dollar. And looking at that collection it looks like he has that kind of stuff.

If you have a collection like this that you want to get rid of, that you have amassed or inherited, you have zero chance of selling it as a job lot for more than $10,000. No dealer will buy thousands of pieces of worthless stock. That costs money to store.

He needs to go through the collection and remove all the modern standard single disc big studio stuff and donate that to charity. That would probably be 90% of the titles.
The other 10% that may be collectible he needs to check sold prices on eBay and list anything worth over $5. He may clear a few thousand selling the rarer titles.

 

Wrong. The streamers have made quite a nice collectors market and have made quite a bit more collectible than it ever was.

This is streamer talk plain and simple.

And it is foolish that will never ever hold more value than purchase price.

I love posts like this. Keeps the market strong. Blurays worth a dollar...sure.

 

Yea, probably a good guess if the seller sold all that at once. I'm thinking he might get 25K or so tops for all of it.

I don't use ebay anymore, so maybe the rules changed for buyers and sellers. I somehow doubt his minimum on bid range would be low enough for anyone to make a series bid.

 

This is certainly a well thought out method of taking care of the collection, with good reasons to make your point.
One in which many would probably do in some manner or another.
Again, my point is not what we think is logical based on our personal value system.
My point is what may happen that surprises all of us.
The kind of sale we end up talking about as the anomaly for the next ten years.

While this high dollar anomaly sale is unlikely, it could happen...So why not play around with the possibility just for fun?

Remember, I am not arguing about a big sale that will undoubtedly happen...because it probably will not.
But the guy did start asking for the moon and sometimes, just sometimes, when you ask for the moon you end up getting much more than you expected.

 

Some fairly innocuous stuff (to me) fetches big money on eBay, most of the rest doesn't. You'll get maybe 10p in the £ back for the majority of it, if you're lucky.

 

99% of all vinyl is pretty much worthless as well (you'll find much of it in your local charity shop). In fact, pretty much 99% of everything is worthless for one reason or another. However, I do agree that selling to the trade and selling in bulk is the two worse things you can do when selling. And you should do it only when other options are exhausted/unavailable.

 

Yes, that bit did surprise me. Does the guy even have an interest in movies?

 

In addition there is a difference between music and movies. Most people listen to their favorite music much more often than they watch their favorite films. Also, while the album (on vinly or CD) is the original release, the VHS, Laserdisc, DVD or BluRay is just the secondary release.

 

He should ship them to Amoeba in San Francisco. They'll take them. I think, though, the time to cash in passed a decade ago.

 

No Zardoz? For shame!

 

You are speaking for yourself there. Movies get far more of my time then music even though I enjoy both incredibly so.

I cannot count the times I have watched my favorite films on repeat.

Star Wars vs Sgt. Pepper.....Star Wars every frickin' time!

 

Hey I took in an extra copy of "Space: 1999" on Blu which has been out of print for quite a while and they wanted to give me 10 bucks! The laugh was on them though (well maybe a little bit) because it was region B.

 

The cases alone are worth more than 5 cents a unit. Can the 5 inch discs be recycled?

 

Yes, but there aren't many places that will take them.

 

The scariest thing about that listing is the suggested ads Ebay throws up of people selling music CDs in lots ranging from 100 to a pallet.

 

In certain underground markets, hard drives with thousands of pre-ripped movies will sell for $500-1000. The kids trade them around and clone the content. Much the same happens with large music collections.

 

Any indie label who still does CD jewel cases or a CD store that swaps out cases for used discs could get a nice bargain there if they have the space for a year or two.