How to make money off antiques
If you want to make money off antiques, you really have to have a game plan.
Make Money
You can’t just find yourself at one flea market after another or one garage sale after another, buy a few items and then sell it for millions of dollars. That doesn’t happen regularly. While it does happen from time to time, you can pretty much count them with both hands.
One particularly famous antique overnight millionaire story that I personally know of involves somebody going to a garage sale and buying a painting for ten dollars or something ridiculously low like that. The owner didn’t even look at the painting. He just saw that it was wrapped and put it on the garage sale.
The buying asked that the painting be unwrapped and after being shown the painting, the buyer paid ten dollars for it. It turns out that this painting is actually a lost masterpiece and after all was said and done, the painting sold for millions of dollars.
This is the kind of story many wannabee antique investors really get excited about. In fact, a lot of them think that they’re going to be the next person to pull this off. Well, it doesn’t work that way. There are no instant big paydays in antiques regardless of what you’ve been lead to believe. Does this mean that all antique items are cheap? Not at all.
What this means though is the fact that of all the antique items out there, only a small percentage get to be worth and obscene amount of money. The rest would appreciate normally like other types of investments. In other words, you can buy something for a thousand dollars and then possibly unloaded in a few years for maybe two thousand or three thousand dollars. Nothing wild. Nothing overly speculative. Nothing too crazy. That’s the kind of return you can get from antiques.
So how do you make money off antiques? First, you can buy and sell. You can buy a lot of antiques and then sell them immediately. This approach works if you know the intrinsic value of antiques. If you can eyeball these antiques and know from a mile away that this item is selling far below its market value, you can make quite a bit of money by simply buying and selling.
The second way you can make money off antiques involves long term collections. Basically, you buy whole collections or lots of products at once and then after enough years pass, you sell these. This approach can make sense when it comes to insurance or other institutional type of purchases. If you are looking for a cheaper way to buy larger collections, you might want to get into the storage bidding business. Basically, storage companies will auction out the contents of storage container units that have gone delinquent. This is a very random way of picking up antiques but this is definitely a cheap way to build large collections.