Dealer, auction house or eBay: what each route actually costs you

The short version

The overall pick for an inherited collection is a split, and that isn't a dodge. Identify what's there, send the handful of good items one way and the bulk the other. The bulk pick is a dealer — for two hundred ordinary circulated coins, one cheque on Tuesday beats months of weekend listing, and the dealer is taking a real risk on stock that may sit unsold for a year. The one to avoid is a single sight-unseen offer for the whole collection, made by the person who has just valued it for you. That's not a route. It's a bet placed against you.

The four routes side by side

Pricing basis: this table compares fee structures, not rates. HeirLoupe holds no fee data and has verified no house's commission or marketplace schedule, and both vary by category, lot value and country. Ask for the rate in writing before you consign or list.

A worked example, assumptions on the table

Here's the arithmetic, with the rates shown as assumptions rather than facts. Plug in the real numbers once you have them in writing.

Read down that list and the ranking flips depending on what you're holding. On one good item the auction house's competition among bidders can beat every other route even after the commission. On a box of ordinary material there's nothing for bidders to compete over, and the fees land on a small number.

Counting your own time

No fee schedule includes this line, so people leave it out and then wonder why selling felt like a second job. Two hundred common coins listed individually on a marketplace is a job, not a sale.

Count it honestly. Photograph, describe, list, answer questions, pack, queue at the post office, handle one return. Ten minutes an item is optimistic, and 200 items at ten minutes is about 33 hours. That's a full working week, spread over several months, at whatever your own time is worth. A dealer's single price for the same box may look low next to the marketplace total, and still be the better deal once those 33 hours are on the page.

Each route, one at a time

A dealer who buys outright

A dealer paying wholesale for a box of bulk is not cheating anybody. They pay today for stock that might sit in a case for a year, they carry the cost of holding it, and they eat the loss when they've misjudged it. That risk is what the margin pays for. For two hundred common circulated coins, a dealer is very often the right answer, and anyone who sneers at that has never tried to sell two hundred common coins one at a time.

The problem is narrower than "dealers pay too little", and it's worth naming precisely: the dealer valuing your collection is also the person buying it. A sight-unseen offer on an entire collection is a bet that there's something good in it, made against you. The fix isn't finding a nobler dealer. It's knowing roughly what you have before the offer is made, which turns one number into a conversation.

Wrong for: a single item that needs authentication, or anything where competitive bidding is the only way to find the top of the market.

An auction house on consignment

Competition between bidders is the one mechanism that finds the ceiling on a genuinely good item, and a specialist house brings the catalogue, the photography and the buyers who already collect that thing. If one piece in the estate is real, this is usually where it belongs.

Two structural details people miss. The seller's commission comes off the hammer price, and some houses add charges for photography, lotting or insurance. Separately, a buyer's premium is charged to the winning bidder on top of the hammer — that money doesn't reach you, and because bidders know they'll pay it, it holds down what they're willing to bid in the first place.

Wrong for: ordinary bulk. Low-value material gets grouped into box lots or declined, unsold lots come back to you, and settlement can be months after the sale.

eBay or another marketplace

You keep more per item here than anywhere else, you set your own price, and the audience is enormous. For a middling number of items you can describe accurately, it's a reasonable route and often the highest-yielding one.

The fee is a percentage of the final price plus payment processing, and then everything else is yours: the packing, the postage, the insurance, the returns, the disputes, and the risk of being the inexperienced seller listing a valuable collectible in public. Describe a coin wrong and it comes back. Describe it right and you needed to know what it was first, which is the part people skip.

Wrong for: two hundred common items, and for anything you can't identify well enough to describe in a listing you'd stand behind.

Keeping it

This belongs in the comparison because it's a real choice, not a failure to choose. Nothing is decaying this month. Some of what's in the box isn't an asset at all — it's your grandfather's handwriting on an album page, and no route prices that.

The one thing that isn't free is storage. Damp and heat do quiet damage over a summer, so move the boxes out of the garage and the attic and into the house. Beyond that, waiting costs you nothing.

Wrong for: an estate that has to be settled and divided between people. If that's you, the executor's inventory guide covers getting a first-pass list before anyone sells, splits or clears.

How we judged this, and what we make

Four things measured, one position stated plainly.

We compared the routes on how the money comes out, how much of your own time each one eats, how fast it settles, and who is doing the valuing at the moment you agree a price. That last one is the criterion most comparisons leave out, and it's the one that decides whether the other three matter.

We didn't publish commission rates, and that's deliberate. HeirLoupe carries no fee data — there's no price table inside the product to quote from, because a number written down on a page becomes a fact families plan around, and real rates vary by house, by category, by lot value and by country. Every percentage on this page is labelled as an assumption. Get the real one in writing.

Our own position is the rest of the methodology. We charge the same flat fee whichever route you pick. We never buy, never sell, never broker, never take a percentage of what you get, and never pass your details to anyone who does. We make the same money if you take the dealer's cheque, if you consign to a house, or if you put the box back in the loft. Before any of it, don't clean anything — cleaning a coin routinely removes 50–90% of its value, and every route pays less for a damaged object.

Five questions to answer about yourself

Is this one good item, or two hundred ordinary ones?

Most estates are both, which is why the split usually wins. Sort that first and the routes almost pick themselves.

Do you know which is which yet?

If not, no route is safe to choose, because you can't tell whether the offer in front of you is generous or a bargain for someone else. What the categories usually hold: inherited coin collections, stamp albums and sports cards each fail in their own predictable way.

How much of your own time is this worth?

Put a number on an hour of it and redo the arithmetic above. For most people the marketplace route loses to the dealer on bulk the moment their own time is priced at anything at all.

How fast do you need the money?

A house being sold, a probate deadline, siblings waiting on a distribution — these are legitimate reasons to take a lower price today. A dealer settles in an afternoon. An auction house may settle a quarter later.

Is anything in the box worth authenticating first?

Grading and authentication cost a fee per item and take weeks, so they're worth it on a short list and wasteful on a long one. Authenticate the few, then let the certificate do the arguing at auction.

This is an informational estimate from photographs, not a certified appraisal. We tell you what is worth paying an appraiser to look at — we have no interest in buying anything you own, and we don't sell anything for you either. Values are always given as ranges, and where a photograph can't settle it, the report says “worth a professional look” rather than inventing a figure.