BLOG
Finds and Interests
“Local auction house” stopped describing geography a while ago. A house can draw the same hundred regulars into the same room it drew ten years ago and still put a lot in front of a bidder three time zones out. The room didn’t get bigger. The doors multiplied.
Blackwell Auctions is what that looks like when it’s done well. Edwin Bailey has owned it for ten years and still calls it a small, local house, which is fair enough, as far as the saleroom goes. Past the saleroom it sells through six venues: LiveAuctioneers, Invaluable, HiBid, Bidsquare, Bidspirit, and Blackwell’s own mobile app.
The consignments tell you more than the venue list does. Blackwell handled a table built by the White House Carpenter Shop out of timber salvaged from Truman’s 1950 gutting of the executive residence, made for the retiring chief usher—and then sold it back to the White House. That is a great deal of provenance work for one lot. At the other end of the shelf, Blackwell has been assembling graded Gen-X material: Star Wars and Ninja Turtles toys, some of the highest-graded examples in existence by Edwin’s account. Two completely different kinds of homework, done out of the same building.
“We’re asked daily about the values of things — ‘What’s my item worth?’ WorthPoint.com is almost always my first click.”
— Edwin Bailey, Blackwell Auctions
That question is where consignments start. Someone calls about a box out of a garage, and the auction house that can answer inside of five minutes is the house that gets the second call. Price history isn’t a research luxury in that moment. It’s customer service with a clock running on it.
I’ve long seen a softening of interest in traditional “heirloom” pieces… I do believe the top tier in nearly every collecting category will continue to enjoy strong demand.
— Edwin Bailey, Blackwell Auctions
Where I think the graded end is heading
Edwin is right about the softening, and I’d push the second half of that further. The split between the top tier and everything under it is getting sharper, not narrower, and grading is the mechanism. A sealed, high-grade vintage toy is a liquid asset with a number attached to it. The same toy loose, with a creased blister, is a thirty-dollar item that was always a thirty-dollar item. What changed isn’t nostalgia. Gen X buyers were always going to come for this material. What changed is that the market can now price the difference between two copies of the same figure to the dollar, and that kind of precision punishes the middle. It looks like top-graded Kenner and Playmates pieces keep climbing while mid-grade drifts. The gap between them is the number worth watching.
Blackwell Auctions is one of more than 1,000 Industry Partners contributing sales data to the WorthPoint Price Guide, now at 1 billion prices. See what Blackwell Auctions has sold.
If your auction house or shop belongs in that network, Nathan Teasdale and Jon Waldman run the Industry Partner program. Either one can get you started.
Join us.