Hopefully I’ll never have to sell my collection, but can you tell me whether it is more profitable to sell coins out of a collection individually, or is it more profitable to sell the collection as a whole?
Personally my experience is showing me to sell the coins individually. I have a 1946-1964 collection of Roosevelt dimes that been listed for about a month without any offers. I had a silver Washington set that I am selling the coins individually and I am receiving quite of bit of offers for the individual coins.
Let's not get the thread closed, because it was not my intention to solicit a sell but only to answer the OP question.
It's probably going to be more profitable to break up your sets and sell the coins individually. However, it's a lot less work, and a lot more convenient to sell them as sets or even as a whole collection. This is how dealers make a lot of money, they buys sets for cheap, then break them up and sell the individual coins for a profit.
Collectors buy coins, investors buy sets. Investors will look for high quality sets since they will be less likely to depreciate, not those associated with common coins. Collectors will be more likely to buy those (common coins) individually.
It really depends on the coins. If you have a set of say seated dimes that are of varying grade and eye appeal, then it's best to sell them individually. But, if that set is of coins of matching quality and eye appeal, in my experience the set as a whole will sell far above the value of the set split and sold individually. Not many people are successful in assembling a matching set. Even the great collections of the past and present are usually split up when sold. Guy
Thats a difficult , if not impossible question to seek an answer on without first having considerably more information about your collection and a sight seen ( in-hand ) appraisal . I strongly suggest, that you start there, before making any decisions with regards to dispersing any or part of your inherited coins, and pieces you added to that collection, providing your feel you are ill-prepared to go it alone.
Always best to break a set apart. Most buyers will not want to go through the hassle of grading/valuing every coin in a set. They will price the key dates and consider the rest pretty much "junk" and pay accordingly.
Individually would be your best bet like most people are saying here but i would only say That 90% of the time, in some instances you have a collection where you have maybe 5 coins from a set of 10 that are real valuable and the rest or not in order to get everything Sold you may want to sell the set that way you wouldnt have to sell the less valuable coins For less or have a much harder time selling them
