This makes me wonder about people with say large train sets or other massive level hobbies, what happens when they must let it all go?
Its not exactly like Hoarding which we covered elsewhere but still its alot of stuff you or your heirs must then get rid of.
I imagine there must be a hobbyist market for things like that, with specialty message boards to spread the word.
I’m always surprised at the large expensive toys that people just walk away from and abandon. Like sailplanes. These are expensive toys, in the multiple tens of thousands of dollars. I know of several that are abandoned, just sitting rotting away at various airports. Here’s one.
Likewise with boats, I think.
Since everyone dies everyone has stuff they have to let go of. This stuff can be thrown in the garbage, donated to friends or organizations, sold to dealers, sold at auctions, garage sales, flea markets, online venues (such as eBay, Facebook or Craigslist)…
The thing with the huge collection of LEGO is that it is, for the most part, portable. It might require a specialty sort of sale or auction to get rid of it all, but at least the buyers can leave with what they buy – and if the items are too big to transport easily, they can be disassembled and reassembled without too much hassle.
You mentioned model trains as another example, and while a serious model railroader may have dozens of locomotives and hundreds of rolling stock (which are easily sellable and portable), the real issue is the layout itself. Serious model railroad layouts are like a home-improvement project gone berserk, and are nearly always built in place, taking up one or more rooms in the owner’s home. Most hobbyist who build such layouts are hand-building terrain, scenery, and buildings, and a big layout has a massive amount of track on the layout (and even more wiring hidden beneath it), and most of that is difficult, if not impossible, to move or reclaim.
Ebay.
I went to an estate sale a while back where the model train collection was probably worth more than the house, and that was upper middle class to begin with. I’m guessing that something like that would end up going to an auction house, as would a basement-sized Lego collection.
I’m sure he will find buyers, however, for me, the joy of LEGO is in the unboxing and building. A vintage set in an unopened box is something I would pay money for. An already built set? Not so much. I sometimes buy LEGO sets for myself and have toyed with the idea of buying two each time. One to open and build and another to sit unopened, increasing in value.
There are sites for trading/selling Lego pieces/sets – Bricklink is the most famous (Though the Lego group has bought that – news to me)
Brian
Which brings up the problem of selling a house designed around an obsessive hobby or to facilitate unusual activities.
Lots of them sit on the market for years because there are so few people who share that degree of interest or lack the “taste” of the owners.
When I retired, I got a model railway that runs round the walls of one bedroom on wooden slabs supported by brackets.
This is it in the early stages. (I have more scenery now.)
It will be pretty difficult to remove (as the track is stapled to the wood.)
I don’t intend to sell the house - but hopefully any buyer might want to keep it.
Actually, that didn’t seem to be the case here. Most of the cars were in display cases.
When it was time to pour the basement floor of their new house, Gramps asked the cement people if they could "make a hill here, another here, and a valley there… and sink these golf holes here and here and here".
He astroturfed the basement, and took three strokes off his game with all the putting practice he got. My kids grew up having golf tournaments at Gramps’s Country Club.
Everyone assumed it’d be a plus when it was time to sell… Nope.
I’m not surprised. My kids love Legos and we still have a big plastic bin of old Legos from when my brother and I were kids. Mostly 80s space sets with some castle and a few construction worker sets.
Seriously. There are like a dozen small to medium sized sailboats right outside my window in various states of “sunk”. AFAIKT, most have just been abandoned and left to mother nature to deal with.
That’s fun, middle boy has wanted a model railroad for years but he was always too young. We might start with a 4x8 setup here before too long.
Ha. A few months before he died my dad asked me about my collection, about 80% of which is unopened, and I asked him “Do you remember that RV set you got me for my birthday last year? It was $65 then. Now that it’s retired that set goes for $170.” To which he replied “Wow, they’re a pretty good investment then!”
My point was that I buy them when they’re current to save money but he’s not wrong 
My sister’s husband died a while ago, and he had a rather large train set in their basement. I think she sold some pieces on line, but eventually sold the rest of it to a train hobby store.
A co-worker is downsizing her house and wants to get rid of her rather large Lego collection. She doesn’t seem to be having much trouble selling them.
It’s been a few years since I bought the components, but I recommend as the manufacturers:
)Same here. I started buying Lego again recently. On Friday I bought the Lego Technic Bugatti Chiron - which I’ve not yet finished assembling - and it’s huge. I’m not quite sure if it will fit nicely in the place I had been intending to put it. My limiting factor in general is the space to put kits in once I’ve built them, but I don’t think I would want to sell this because I can’t imagine buying it myself once it’s already been assembled.
It would actually be quite tricky to take apart, as there are locking pegs in some places that would be difficult to remove. But even if I did take it apart, I’d have to sort all the pieces back into numbered ziplock bags and put them back in the original boxes (which I still have) before it was in anything like the state that I would want to buy it in. I don’t suppose many sellers who have built the kit already do that. Unless people are genuinely selling pristine boxes, I would not want to buy them.
But if they are selling pristine boxes, I can see paying a lot for a kit I wanted - even since I started looking at kits in the last month or so, I’ve found recently discontinued ones that I like the look of, and some of them are already nearly twice the price on Amazon. If I bought them, I’d open them and build them, though.
I suppose it’s like anything - the rarest wines and whiskies go for tens of thousands per bottle, and those would have been the ones that people wanted to drink at one time, but I doubt that many people who buy them now for that sort of money are going to drink them…