I was on a short vacation last weekend (in-state, but it was my first non-family-visiting vacation in years), and spent a little time in an antique shop, the sort with booths for many different dealers. There were thousands of antiques, and I did end up buying a little $6 china cup to give to my mom at Christmas.
It got me thinking, though. Where did the dealer buy the cup, at a low enough price to make reselling it profitable? Who knows how many items are for sale just in this tiny state? Are dealers really acquiring a lot of new inventory, or do these represent collections amassed slowly over a long period of time, as a hobby?
My grandparents were antique dealers for 40+ years until they finally retired in their late 70s. They bought from all kinds of places: flea markets (sometimes in other countries, mostly France and England), little old ladies who were clearing out their attics before downsizing their houses, other antique shows if there was a particular item they thuoght they could resell at a profit, etc.
If my grandfather were alive today, I’m sure he’d be checking out Craigslist.
Estate sales have always been popular. Often times things sold there are in a bulk purchase, a group of items. That may allow resale of single items for an acceptable profit.
I have a friend who makes a living out of buying things cheap at country auction sales, where people are not aware of their “real” value (nothing has, in my opinion, a value before a seller and a buyer agrees on a price), and selling them in Stockholm where people are more knowledgeable.
Back in the day, antique dealers would employ, or at least buy from pickers, who would scour the back country, buying up furniture from country people ignorant of its worth. I’m sure this avenue has dried up for the most part, but may still exist on a small scale. I would say that auctions are a big source, in addition to those things already named. My experience of auctions is that the buyers are about evenly split between collectors and dealers.
My mother is an antique dealer and I would echo all of the above. The antique dealer makes money like any other broker–they buy stuff from people who don’t have the means or knowledge to bring their goods to market, and they sell to people who come to them because they *are *the market. My mom started out by going to garage sales an hour before the advertised start time to get the best pickings. “Oh, I’m sorry, did it say NINE? I could have sworn you were starting at EIGHT.”
eBay has taken a big bite out of this model, because now the little guy can reach a huge market and figure what a specific item is worth quickly and easily. But he still has to know that it’s worth selling in the first place. A lot of times you’ll go to an estate auction and they sell these big lots of goods, and you might not even know what’s in the lot. Most heirs do not have the time or knowledge or desire to comb through every single piece of the dearly departed’s belongings to research it. Every once in a great while you can luck into something that turns out to be in big demand in an esoteric market but looks like junk to the deceased granddaughter. But that’s rare.
There was also a celebrated case where a guy found an [oxymoron]original copy[/oxymoron] of the Declaration of Independence hidden inside a picture frame of some worthless-looking painting. A woman my mom knows claimed that he bought it from her, but she never intended to sell it and he grabbed it out of her car when she wasn’t looking and paid her assistant for it, or some such thing. My mom and this woman used to have booths at an antique market in Adamstown, Pa., where this happened, so I guess it’s possible it was her.
I used to work for an antiques dealer, and this particular dealer also ran antique shows twice a year. Dealers from all over the region came in and set up in a civic center, so it was like an antique mall for a weekend. I helped the dealers unload their trucks before the show, and load them up after.
Many dealers bought and traded with other dealers at the shows.
If you ever get a chance to watch the Ian McShane series Lovejoy, you can see a good example of how antique dealers aquire their pieces.
One of my best friends is a collector of furniture made in the Buffalo area. He said it was much easier 10 or 15 years ago, when there was a die-off of the previous generation of old-money households. Their estates would be liquidated at an estate sale. The children might have been off in some far-flung part of the country, so it would have been impractical to get the pieces they wanted. Also, it was more common to find houses where every piece of furniture was a valued antique; all Kittinger, all Stickley, or all some other high-end brand.
While Buffalo still has plenty of estate sales and old-money families, today the “good stuff” is scattered about more. My friend now has the best luck with estate sales at upper-middle class neighborhoods in the city and inner suburbs, along with white holdouts in neighborhoods that are now predominantly black. Many held on to their houses for so long for sentimental value, or because it was in the family for generations, so they’re going to be more likely to hild on to old furniture and family belongings.
There is an entire estate sale subculture. They then sell to dealers or sell at auction houses like this one that dealers frequent.
You’d more often be surprised at how little most of this stuff goes for, even at very high quality auction houses. Look at some of the prices realized here for some amazing pieces - cheap new schlock would cost more in many cases. Yes some go for many thousands but much for only a few hundred. People watch those TV shows and feel that everything is a treasure. Most old stuff really is not worth all that much.
(…trudges up to attic and puts m-i-l’s hammered aluminum serving tray back in the trunk…) If I had a few antiques lying around, would it be better (for me) to sell them on Craigslist or call an antique dealer? I was thinking of taking pictures of some pieces and bringing them in to him for perusal. Not that I’m holding my breath hoping to get wealthy, but the stuff is just sitting around and no one wants it, least of all me.
My experience in the UK (i’m no dealer, but i know a few) is they buy at auction, often big lots, so they get maybe one bit that’s worth the money and the rest goes in the shop in case someone likes it. Often they buy and have in mind a customer to pass it on to, a collector or someone who wants say a big table or desk etc. Here you also get the guys with tiny scales who weight up any silver or gold and are interested purely in scrap values . As well as that i know people who do complete house clearances. Sadly usually a person dies, and they clear the house, one truck to the dump the other to auction or to sub dealers. One i know takes a lot of furniture but not for the UK (its currently very out of fashion) he fills up a container and ships it to the US or Australia.
Auction house are fascinating places to shop as long as you leave yourself free as to exactly what you want, and remember you just have to big one more time over a dealer to get a bargain.
Much of the “antique” furniture found today was made not more than four years ago in Vermont, and artificially “aged” in the homes of clumsy people. Hand to my heart, it’s true.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that the antiques market goes through phases of what’s popular, and therefore pricy, and what’s not. If you watch something like Antiques Roadshow often times the appraiser will influence his numbers based off of whether the item in question is in high demand right now or if the market for such things has cooled off. If you’re sitting on a nice lot of a certain kind or style of antique and that market takes off it’s paid for you to have had the space in which to keep it.
I remember when I was a child my parents were big into antiques and things from the 20’s through the 60’s were looked at as junk, they wanted 18th and 19th century items, but now a particularly nice art deco sofa or an authentic boomerang formica table can be worth far more than the hall trees and chairs that my parents put a premium on.
I trade in some used and vintage books.
Another note, regarding the $6 cups in the OP, is that sometimes you lose money on part of a collection you buy and make money on the other.
Could buy 200 pieces for $10 apiece and of course, pay $2000 for the lot.
One cup could go for $2000 the next week.
At that point, you’ve broken even.
If you have 199 pieces that’ll sell for $6 in a timely fashion, then that’s $1194.
Grand total, you invested $2000 and got back almost $3200. On paper, the dealer is taking a $4 loss selling a cup for $6 but that’s probably the wrong way of thinking about it.
Works for me.
FOOTNOTE: The above example oversimplifies to keep things simple. In reality, well, you’d probably be buying for a yield well above 1.6:1, and a quarter of the pieces you hauled off would take years to sell, assuming they didn’t wind up in the trash.
I know one local antique dealer, who, before they retired, would take a trip to England at least once every other year. They would select items they wanted from wholesale dealers and have them shipped to a gathering point, where they would fill up a container (or two). A few months later, the container arrived back home. They were a very small shop, and the container kept it stocked until the next trip.
So obviously they made enough on the lot to pay for their trip and the shipping, at least over 2 years.
The rest of the shop came from estate sales. If they were hired to conduct one, they would cherry-pick the best stuff first for the shop, then hold the public sale, then whatever was left over went to the dump.
If you live in the US, check out a show called "american pickers:. Chronicles a couple of guys driving around the country buying up antiques for those stores. Mostly they visit people who live in a rural area and have collecting all sorts of stuff in their barns, garages, etc…
I’m quite familiar with that show, but I don’t think they represent your average antique store. They are quite discriminating as to what they pick and their store is very small. They mostly work for specialized clients and concentrate on selective product lines.
Based on the stuff that those two goofs tend to pick I’d say that their number one client is whomever is in charge of decorating the walls at TGI Fridays and the like.
