Estate Collection of Airplane Models

Sorry to hear about your father-in-law, my condolences to your family. Where is the collection located? If you can find a "Fine Scale Modeler" magazine there are lists of people in the wanted classifieds that buy model collections. If you have a local IPMS chapter you can possibly take them to a contest-swap meet and sell them yourself. Hope this helps. Scott

bk wrote:

Thanks Scott!

Fortunately, my Father in Law is still very much with us - maybe the use of the term estate sale was misleading! We are just reducing the amount of "stuff" he keeps at the storage place.

Thanks for the suggestion to look in FSM. I know he has a subscription to that mag. Not familiar with IPMS, but I'll look it up.

-bk

I also suggest contacting a local IPMS chapter for help.

Earlier this year, the friend of one of our IPMS chapter members passed-on. The family had somewhere over 1,000 kits that they needed to disposition. At first, they were just going to "throw them all away". Then one of the daughters remembered that her dad had a "model friend" and contacted our IPMS member. He arranged to transport the entire collection from their house (a small town about 60 miles away) to his basement for an IPMS chapter garage sale. He then notified us IPMS chapter members of his sale and it was a grand event! The pricing was at a bargain, yet reasonable level. There were many, many kits that were out-of-production and there were also many out-of-print books and magazines for sale. There was quite a bit still left over after the IPMS garage sale so he placed an ad in the local classifieds and sold a good portion of the remaining stock. Our IPMS member kept the proceeds in the amount of what it cost him to rent the U-Haul trailer and the remaining revenue (which was considerable) all went back to the family. The family members were quite surprised at how much the collection had been worth, even at bargain pricing and were pleased about how easy the "disposal" process had been. So the happy end of the story is that the family received considerable cash where they wouldn't have if they'd just thrown out the collection and a fanatic group of model kit lovers were given an opportunity to fill in holes in their collections with rare kits and give these models a new loving home; everyone wins.

To find an IPMS chapter in your area visit:

"bk" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:

collected airplane

models in their

Selling hundreds

guys have any

these models,

liked to

place. All

manufacturer,

Thanks. Wonderful feedback!

Best return on money would probably be to sell off individual items at an IPMS meeting or show. You may want to hang onto some of the stuff to ebay, if it goes back 50 years. Don't sell something for $2 that might get $75 on ebay; that's no exaggeration!

Second best, but faster, would be to auction the stuff off at an IPMS meeting, where the chapter gets 10% of proceeds. The very quickest way to get rid of the stuff and make a buck (not the most money) would be to sell the collection to a local hobby store.

Good luck, and I'm happy to hear of your father-in-law's good health! Grins.. I thought the same when I saw the word "estate".

--- Tontoni

Hello, I buy Collections at a fair price to you. Please contact me at snipped-for-privacy@masterpiecemodels.com

Regards John Geigle

bk wrote:

Try Dean's Hobby Stop, he is located in Michigan. Dean Sills is a super guy and easy to deal with, I recommend him. I have no connection to Dean other than that I'm a satisfied customer.

Web Site

Hope that helps...Mark

OOPS! Glad to have made that mistake. Scott

Contact your local model club. If they have annual contests, they could sell off the entire lot, "raffle style". At a couple dollars a chance; and if their shows draw hundreds of active participants...

You may want to look for a local hobby shop - harder and harder to find these days - some will do sales on consignment, or buy out a whole collection for sale from stock. Worth the question in any event.

First of all, what do you have against money? For what you possibly have, you could make thousands of dollars by selling on ebay which would make it very worthwhile to get set up and run these things off ebay, maybe even work a consignment deal with someone.

As for selling in bulk, why not just make a little website listing the kits and see what offers you will get? Hardly a major effort with Yahoo sitebuilder or something like that. If anything you could get some quotes as to their approximate value as a group and individually.

You could even scan the net yourself for approximate values of many of the kits.

Too many people carelessly give away valuable stuff because they get this "don't want to trouble myself with this junk" attitude....later on they regret it.

Some of these kits could be quite valuable.

Thanks again folks. Really helpful information.

We may post a list once it's compilied. No problem with the idea of making money, for sure!

old hoodoo wrote: