Whether you’re just trying to get a feel for what your old collection is worth or you’re looking to jump back in, you’ll need to learn how to accurately pull comps for your cards!
The most reliable place (and the place where most 3rd party apps get their data) is from eBay “sold” data. It’s the largest marketplace for cards and have good data transparency into their sales.
Let’s dive in a little more!
Is Your Childhood Collection Valuable?
In early 2021, I pulled out my childhood collection that I hadn’t touched in 20 years. I sorted through all 6,000 cards.
I found perhaps two cards worth over $100 (a few more likely will be after grading), and a WHOLE lot of cards that look cool and carry nostalgic value…but no real world value.
My problem for such a low-value collection is 3-fold:
- I didn’t buy any singles. Relying only on opening packs/boxes (especially from the cheap products I could afford) to to build a valuable collection is a losing proposition
- I collected during poor rookie classes. I mostly collected basketball from 2000-2002, so I missed out on both the good 1998-99 class, and the all-time great 2003-04 class.
- A lot of my collection was from the junk wax era. This is defined as a time of CRAZY overproduction from around 1988-1996 or so. I liked buying up older packs because they were cheap. I got a lot of cool players (Jordans, Garnett rookies, Bird, and even some Kobes) Problem is most of these aren’t worth much. I have nice looking Jordans worth $5 and hall of fame rookies worth $2.
So, in a snapshot, is your collection valuable? It depends on a few things…
- Did you collect mostly during the junk wax era?
- Were you able to collect HOF rookies?
- Did you keep them in good condition?
I strolled around eBay and found some interesting pricing. Here are some incredible, all-time great players with rookies from the junk wax era:
It’s pretty insane, right?
It’s also unlikely that the cards you have sitting in a shoebox as a kid could even grade out a PSA 9. Out of my entire collection, I sent in 12 cards to get graded and I was pretty good about keeping the better ones in top loaders.
[If you’re thinking about grading some of your older cards, I’d recommend reading this first => Reviewing the Complete List of Sports Cards Grading Companies]
However, what if you get all-time greats BEFORE the junk wax era?
So really, it just depends when you were born and when you started collecting…or if you were smart enough to buy up these guys even when you were a little older.
And just for fun, here’s a PSA 6 of Jim Brown:
The easiest thing to do with your old collection is to start sorting into different piles. Anything that’s not a rookie and not a hall of famer goes into a commons box. I’ll then separate the rest into piles of inserts, base, and rookies.
If you’re looking for some tips on sorting through a large collection of cards, I detail how I sorted and decided what to do with my cards here:
=> The Complete Guide to Sell Basketball Cards for the Most Money
How to Find Out How Much Your Football Cards are Worth
- eBay – As I mentioned at the top, no matter how anyone wants to spin it, you must get your comps from eBay. Occasionally, I’ll see a rogue in a Facebook group talk about selling yourself short and you can dictate price. “Don’t fall for the trap of eBay comps!”
This makes no sense. Cool if you want to do it that way…but no one else does. It’d be like selling your home and all the recently sold comparable properties says your house is $400k. Then you say “that’s nice, I’ll sell mine for $500k.” Your house ain’t gonna sell.
When researching eBay comps, always be sure to filter for the “Sold” listings. People can (and do) list whatever crazy price they feel like it for their Buy It Now. You need to see what’s actually sold.
- 130point and SellthePeak – These are both similar sites, so it comes down to preference. These sites pull sold data from eBay, but you can also see what the Best Offer price was (you can’t see this on eBay itself). Both of these are great, but I typically use 130point.
- Market Movers – This app is pretty good with a ton of data in it. It’s heavily focused on investing and helps you identify undervalued cards to go after. However, it’s a bit on the pricey side, so I don’t use it personally. Again, they pull values from eBay.
- CardLadder – Here we go. This is my favorite and one that I use every day. I love its simplicity, I love the charts, I love how it tracks my collection, and I love that I can set target prices and get alerts. Over the summer, I set my sights on a Darius Garland Prizm rookie. When it hit my target price, I got an email and then found one on eBay selling for around that price.
They are limited in what cards can be found in there, but most good players’ rookies are in there. Considering the cards I buy for investments are almost always good rookies, I can use this tool to keep an eye on values for all my cards without searching one-by-one on eBay.
- Beckett – Lastly, I want to throw in a word for Beckett. If you collected as kid, then you’ll remember that you needed to get a monthly subscription to Beckett in order to see what values were on your cards. There was nothing better than seeing that nice green up-arrow next to your card!
However even as a kid I found this completely unreliable. I specifically remember being frustrated that a Vince Carter listed at $25 sold for $2 in the early days of eBay.
In my opinion, why would you want to grab values from somewhere other than where they’re actually selling? I’d rather see the real sold comps as opposed to someone’s opinion of what it should be selling for.