Here we are at the last article in our four-part series on making cash in Seattle’s “junk” trade — those items you spot at flea markets, and garage and estate sales, that most people might pass by. Here are Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, if you’ve missed any.
I’m about to suggest a category of collecting that no one else is even looking at. Look, I’m not Nostradamus. But I think the conditions are right for this category to not only take off, but to be a dominant category in the future. Then, let’s finish up with a few tips on how to sell the items you’ve scored.
Vinyl Records
Buy any period original vinyl records by the Beatles, Stones, Who, Beach Boys, and Elvis. Check the dates of publication. 1960s are best. Be sure to buy anything produced with the Apple Label, the house label of the Beatles’ Apple Records in the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. Look for regional punk bands from the late 1970s, such as X or the Germs in L.A.
Jazz records by known artists, particularly live albums, are collectible. Many live jazz recordings never made it cassettes or CDs, including those by John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Dave Brubeck.
In the 1970s, record companies put out picture discs, vinyl with embedded art, to attract buyers. If you find one, buy it. They are highly collectible.
Here’s a hot tip. Though collectible publications don’t even have “Album Cover Art” as a category, I suspect they will in the near future. In the 1960s and 1970s, rock groups and jazz musicians worked with the finest contemporary artists and photographers to design wild, far-out album covers. These will become collectible over time. When you go through record collections at estate sales, take your time to go through every album. Read the credits. Look for names like Gary Burden, Henry Diltz, Peter Corriston and Robert Whitaker.
Look for the craziest band names: If it’s something like the 1910 Fruitgum Company, the Barbarians, or the Magic Mushrooms, you should buy it. Look for glamorous women and sharp-dressed men. Look for singers wearing crazy clothes.
Start with your own family. Did you have brothers or a father that collected records? Scour their collections. Did they save tickets, posters, T-shirts from concerts? These are all highly collectible.
Price Points: $2 to $5. Buy these and hold them.
Selling
Having told you what to buy and how much to buy it for, now it’s time to sell. You can sell direct, or you can sell to a dealer. If direct, the real cost is time. Craigslist, AbeBooks, Amazon, and dozens of other selling sites are great venues to sell your goods. But these channels can take time to reach a purchaser. You have to be patient and stay search-engine friendly.
If you sell direct at your home by holding your own garage sale, the profits can add up fast. But garage sales take time to set up, and you must do a thorough job of marketing it with ads on Craigslist, estatesales.net, the newspaper, and in any local community blogs, neighborhood newsletters, and church bulletins. Massive signage at key intersections within two miles of your house on sale days won’t hurt either.
Pricing is always hard, but for a rule of thumb, start at three times what you paid for an item. If you want to sell to a dealer, you will make immediate cash, but dealers will give you less since they have to sell through to their customers. With dealers, you’ll want simply to double your money.
The Final Word
Everyone can use a little extra cash. And most of us want more entertainment. The buying and selling of use items, the junk trade, can be a great way to have both. Like anything, the more you do it, the better you will get. Over time, you’ll be surprise how that one rare item will jump out at you, even in a house jammed with items.
Just this week, I was driving by a yard sale and I hit the brakes. There, among the used baby toys, was large abstract painting, oil on canvas. I typed the artist’s name into my iPhone and saw that this 75-in. by 60-in. painting might be valuable. It was priced at $20. The woman at the sale just wanted the painting out of her basement, so I offered $5, which she happily took. Further online research surfaced a similar painting by the artist, going for $500 on eBay.
