I have a roll of 1881 S Morgans from the Wells Fargo find of some decades ago. I want to sell those. The coins are GEM BU and local dealers told me they would grade MS64 for the most part. The proof rating is mostly "satin like" or near that. I got a $1K offer from one dealer, is that fair for what I described, or is it too low? The coins show up at retail at about $70-75 on ebay, So at $50 I am not sure that is a great deal -leaving the dealer with a rather fat margin.
Yeah I'd say it is a fair offer, and no he won't have a fat margin either. You have to remember he's going to have to take pics of each coin, several of them for each to get a good one. Then he's going to have to spend more time listing them. Then he's going to have to pay his fees, about 15% for each. The 15% alone drops his profit to $10 per coin. Add in his time spent doing the work, and he's hardly making anything per coin. And, his fees may go up because he is going to be trying to sell 20 of arguably the most common Morgan there is in 64. So he may have to list some of them several times.
Thanks guys I thought the industry operated on smaller margins, obviously I am wrong. Selling collectible coins is far more costly to the dealer than bullion coins.
The key to all of this is the anticipated grade aspect of it all. If most of the roll(s) have MS64 coins, that means you'll see something like an average of 17-18 MS64 and 2-3 MS63/MS62 in the average roll. One out of 15-20 rolls might have an MS65 coin. Remember, the coins are distributed on a weighted curve based by grade. What I mean is the bell curve would have a MS62/MS63 midpoint. The MS64 roll is weighted on the MS63/64 end of the curve, but distribution would still be heavily weighted AGAINST having a coin grade higher than MS64. That means 85% of the roll will be MS64 and 15% will be worse, in the average case. Even if the dealer gets $60 per MS64 coin, they'd probably get $40 or less for coins lower than that. That means they're expecting a final sales value of $1140 per roll. This assumes the dealer takes the time to sell each coin individually. They *might* just leave it as a roll and sell the roll for $1100 to someone else. The point is that paying $1000 for something that you expect to sell for $1100-$1140 is more than fair. A coin dealer locally offered a woman that I met face value on Hawaii overprint notes. The notes would grade between and 8-12 on average. He also offered $900 for two rolls of Morgans + $8 or so in mixed Barbers and Walkers. So, yes, you could do a lot worse than getting 88-91% of retail.
