Ebay 208 lighthouse collection

Someone is selling an entire collection of lighthouse, about half appear to be Harbour Lights. 208 of them he says that belonged to a 90 year old gentleman. Valued at 9000. he has set a reserve price of 1200. Should be interesting to see if they sell and for what price.

Ebay Item

I saw that, too. I wish the guy who's selling it good luck. I wonder how you go about shipping a 208 piece collection...?

Interesting list of stuff. Sure would make a dent in one's want list wouldn't it. Several of these I would like to have but I sure couldn't use all of them with a new house of major addition. I wonder also how one ships 200+ lighthouses.

I'd say he'd have to ship them - VERY CAREFULLY!

I wish I had the money to bid on them - that's a steal!

He claims that everything is boxed and ready to ship. I hope he packed them very well. What a job, packing 208 items. Better him than me.

Bert

Not an offering that exudes confidence for the buyer. 98% accurate listing. Please no questions. 7-25 no boxes, etc.

I did some analysis of the actual listing and here's what's included:

Harbour Lights
[*]47 Limited Edition Harbour Lights
[*]4 Society Editions Harbour Lights (2 freebies)
[*]2 Christmas Editions (both Herford Inlet)
[*]1 Special Edition (Eddystone)
[*]14 Spyglass pieces
[*]13 Ornaments
[*]17 GLOWs
[*]14 Little Lights

Other Lines
[*]12 Lefton
[*]8 Scaasi Lamp Finials
[*]41 Scaasi Lighthouses
[*]2 Spoontiques
[*]4 Thomas Kincade
[*]5 Cheryl Spencer Collins
[*]12 Coll. Amer. Lighthouses
[*]9 Other items

My tally says that's 205 items plus "706 Alcatraz Middle Bay MTK w/Shoal Calif"

Let's use this to understand the major problems of selling 'complete collections'.

1. Forget the non-Harbour Lights items. There is no secondary market for any of these.

2. Among the 47 LE Harbour Lights, there are NO 'hard to find' items. Perhaps this collection included a few originally and they have been sld off already or the original collector started collecting in 1998-1999 and never bought on the secondary market.

3. So who would buy this collection - assuming it included only the Harbour Lights pieces? Presumably it would be someone who is already a collector and now is making the leap into the big time. But that likely buyer already has some pieces - and there's a good chance they have many of the ones being offered. And these are not the pieces you want to have duplicates of.

Did this collection cost $9,000? (I'm only estimating here)
[*] 47 LEs @ $70 = $4,290
[*] 17 GLOWs @ $50 = $850
[*] 2 Society + 2 Freebies @ $80 = $160
[*] 1 Eddystone @ $80 = $80
[*] 2 Hereford @ $75 = $150
[*] 2 Spyglass sets @ $75 = $150
[*] 13 Ornaments @ $15 = $195
[*] 14 Little Lights @ $14 = $196

Total for Harbour Lights = $6,071

I'm not sure of current prices on the other pieces, but I guess $9,000 might be a bit of a stretch. Perhaps $8,000.

So let's say your collection has lots of holes that could be filled by the 53 Harbour Lights pieces (counting the Spyglass items as 2).

If you could buy the whole thing for $1,200, that would be about $24 each.

You could give the Little Lights to your kids to play with and make a gift of the GLOWs to Sean or Tim.

Perhaps you could donate the non-HL pieces to a charity and get a $1,200 tax deduction... or maybe a $2,000 one.