Selling a stamp collection, advice needed please

AyJaydee

Hello, this is intended for any stamp collectors who are proficient with buying and selling.

I have a collection that I wish to dispose of and I need some advice. I’m not jumping into selling yet, no rush there, this is really about managing expectations when I don’t know what I’m doing.

The collection is English First Day Covers and Presentation Packs, collected from 1980 to 2011. There are over 200 stamp issues, most of them duplicated as FDC’s and PP’s. They are all kept in Philatelic Bureau Albums and untouched. There is also a significant number of stamps from the former Yugoslavia, on picture envelopes. (They were sent over from Croatia shortly after the division of Yugoslavia). There is also a small number other stamp items: Jersey, New Zealand and ‘Railway stamps’.

I have compiled a list of what I have and have sent an email off to a stamp auctioneers.

I really have no idea what a reasonable asking price would be! Are they worth less than the purchase value of the postage stamps? Could they be worth more than a couple of £thousand?

I have never had anything to do with selling on ebay and really don’t want the hassle. I am not interested in stamps, has anyone any suggestions for where to sell and what I could expect in terms of a price?

Thank you

molerat

From past experience unless there is something really rare and valuable in the collection I suspect they will be worth a lot less than you expect and an awful lot less than was paid for them.  We were shocked when getting a collection valued.  There is not really a market for collections, the market is in single items to fill a gap and dealers will pay a minimum because they will be stuck with the dross that no one else wants.   There will be value in useable (or swappable with RM) stamps but again much less than face value.

soolin

Argh, I accidentally deleted my post, I’ll try again.

FDCs sell best in small batches as singly they tend to be around £1-£1.50 , check out eBay for completed sales, don’t look at listed prices as people are still trying to achieve higher prices for them. 

Mint unhinged stamps usually sell for around 65 - 75% of face value , again eBay is a great help to see what’s worth listing. I sold some early mint presentation packs on Vinted for almost 80% of face value, much more than I would have hoped to achieve on eBay. 

As for overseas stamps, I used to bundle them up and sell by weight, but they so,d poorly and I haven’t felt it worth my time to list recently. 

Pictorial stamps can still be used as well, so if you do send letters , then use them up that way. 

kalsha

Presentation packs - mine were for the period 1970 to 2015.  From experience, they are not fetching the face value.  I have ended up breaking them up and using the stamps to post Ebay items.  But recently with the introduction of Simple  Delivery I am using less stamps.   I am wondering what to do next.
First Day covers - they just about fetch a £1 each but recently none have sold.
Can't help you with the stamps as I haven't even started sorting them yet!

soolin

kalsha said:

Presentation packs - mine were for the period 1970 to 2015.  From experience, they are not fetching the face value.  I have ended up breaking them up and using the stamps to post Ebay items.  But recently with the introduction of Simple  Delivery I am using less stamps.   I am wondering what to do next.
First Day covers - they just about fetch a £1 each but recently none have sold.
Can't help you with the stamps as I haven't even started sorting them yet!

About a year, perhaps slightly more than that I offered some of my albums to a Bricks and mortar auction house, and after looking at a few photos they weren't interested. They said they would take 'proper' collections, those with philatic albums of errors and rares- but a common or garden amatuer collection ,and I have 20 albums or so as well as all the loose , FDCs and mint unhinged would be unlikely to meet their house minimum bid of £15. I have a penny black , the lot inherited from my dad and his brother - but apparently they are common. 

Alfrescodave

FDC's usually sell nearer to 20p each than £1 unless they have a rarity factor associated with them. More often they are sold as bulk packs per weight. The days of buying/selling FDC' s as an investment are long since gone.

AyJaydee

Yes, this is all as I suspected and thank you for your comments all.
As I looked through these albums and compiled my list of them, I realised that they were beautiful miniature works of art. There are also a number on subjects that interest me. So my position has now shifted from ‘team list it’, to ‘team love it’. They are staying.

GabbaGabbaHey

soolin said:

 I have a penny black , the lot inherited from my dad and his brother - but apparently they are common. 

While the Penny Black was of some interest to collectors, because it was the world's first self-adhesive postage stamp, there were over 68,000,000 of them issued, so they are not in any way "rare".

RedImp_2

Lots of variations on Penny Black’s, plate numbers, then there’s things like postmarks, margins etc.  Normally worth more than the FDC’s we’ve been mentioning though!