There’s the old-skool tried and true method: find an appraiser. I’m sure there is a time and place for that, but for my money, there’s nothing like real world supply and demand to find a true market value.
The best overall resource I’ve found for determining fair-market value of items is Ebay. However, you need to use the Completed Auctions feature exclusively while searching. As of May 2006 it’s on the lower left hand side.
Check this box, then do your search on the item in question. The reason why this is important is that the current value of item auction has little do with its ultimate selling price. You want to find the final price. That is what completed auctions does.
That’s not the whole picture, however.
You want to take into account the value of the item to a local audience if it doesn’t need to be shipped and it’s awkward. Some items go for very little in Ebay because the shipper imposes high shipping costs, either appropriately or to artificially raise their profit due to the way Ebay charges the seller for the sale of the item. A heavy, bulky, difficult to pack and ship might have a selling price on Ebay that is a small fraction of the total price, including shipping. Your local audience might be willing to pay closer to that total if they can avoid shipping.
This Indigo II Solid Impact, which was the cats pajamas in 1997 (selling for $30,000+) is now worth $7.16 according to Ebay, but requires about $40 cost of shipping (not unreasonable for such a heavy and delicate item). I’m pretty sure that t-shirts from SGI in that era would probably fetch more¦.
You also need to be sure you are actually looking at the same item you are selling. Ebay does not have Amazon’s item authority so it’s caveat emptor to ensure that you are getting what you think you are getting. That’s true everywhere, but it would be prudent to be extra cautious on Ebay.
To a remote buyer, the shipping costs would also apply to your sale. If you need to ship the item to sell it, then its value to you is closer to the actual sale price, without the shipping cost.
By looking at several items and their shipping costs, you can start to get a picture of how the market values your item.
In my humble opinion, this is the only number that matters when considering whether to sell/junk/donate the item, not what is printed in a catalog and not what you paid for it. I remember long arguments with my brother as a child who bemoaned the fact that the catalog said a certain baseball card in his collection was worth four times what the dealer was willing to pay him – as far as I was concerned it was worth in dollars what he could sell it for, no more, no less.
Other factors to consider are the condition of your item (versus what Ebay sellers have listed), whether the Ebay seller has a great or poor reputation, what extras are included, or key pieces missing, and whether comparable items have quality listing or poorly formatted listing. It’s not unusual for a seller with a poor feedback score or poorly set up selling page to fetch less dollars for their item because the buyers are taking more of a risk.
If your item is fairly rare (in that there are no completed auctions) you might check the regular in-progress auction just to ensure you’ve spelled it correctly and perhaps create a ˜favorite search’ to see if one comes up later.
Other resources that are very useful are:
* craiglist (use your local site if applicable)
* amazon (amazon’s marketplace is healthy comparison market for many items – not just books and music)
* google base
* FreeCycle (if someone is giving away something you are thinking of selling, that’s a pretty clear hint!)
* It’s Deductible (great tip thanks to NYCinephile via Lifehacker)
You can also try the various Ebay œwe’ll sell it for you shops. They will often be able to give you an idea what the item will sell for, and actually do the work for you of selling it – for 30%-40% of the total take. As this blog points out, however, maximizing $ is not the end goal here. Getting it out of your house is. So don’t discount that option!
You are generally going to find that the internet has made items that are truly rare very valuable indeed. However, it has also had the effect of making the items that are not all that rare much less valuable. More on that later¦
Once you have a value, you now have some hard information on whether the space it is occupying is worth it. You might be surprised as I was, that there are items on shelves that you don’t want or need that are worth less than the shelf space itself. Think about that for a moment.
There are a gazillion pages on valuing items for donation. Generally donations are tax-deductible if your bracket is such that they are not discounted completely. Just the way you probably don’t want to judge whether to sell a stock solely on taxes, I don’t think you should use the donation value to make this judgement.
I’ve set a value – fairly high – that it’s worth the trouble of trying to sell something. For almost everything else that still in serviceable condition, tossing it in the car and dropping it off at the charitable organization accomplishes my decluttering goal.
One exception is books. Amazon makes it so easy to list books for sale that if I think a book has a credible chance of selling for $50+, I’ll list it. disclosure – i’m an Amazon stockholder.
Amazon is also a great resource for determining a fair-market value, especially for books, where there is an especially active and tight ˜market’.
To find the ˜market’ price of a book, look for the ˜New And Used’ link below the title. The nice thing about using Amazon here is that condition must be listed and shippings costs are fixed so that sellers cannot ˜hide’ under a low sales price by putting in a high-shipping
cost
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