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Price Guide

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robertlucas1970

I just wondered why nobody has done price guide for pins, I know they seem to change a bit every month, but it would just be a Guide, if we can find out the value of any car I am sure we could have a guide for 50 or so pinballs.
We could have a price for Players condition, Good condition and HUO Mint.
Just looking at the 2 Scared Stiffs I have seen in the last month, both look the same condition, yet £1200 difference in price............
 
robertlucas1970 said:
I just wondered why nobody has done price guide for pins, I know they seem to change a bit every month, but it would just be a Guide, if we can find out the value of any car I am sure we could have a guide for 50 or so pinballs.
We could have a price for Players condition, Good condition and HUO Mint.
Just looking at the 2 Scared Stiffs I have seen in the last month, both look the same condition, yet £1200 difference in price............
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You've missed another 2 possible price guides, Retail and HLD.

Joking aside it's a great idea, always find it hard to guess a price for different machines.
 
How would this work? Taking Cue Ball Wizard as an example, that's an £800-£1000 machine to a lot of people on here. The same machine could sell for a lot lot more to a non-pinhead who wants a pool themed game to go in a room with a pool table. I bought my old CBW for £800, a year later I sold it to HLD for £1500, they sold it for £3500 about 3 weeks after that. How do you price guide a machine like that?
 
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A price guide would be really helpful, but imho would only really work if it provided a lot of information.

I would have thought you need a database really, that just stores all sales and has a search function. So you would put in fishales, the database then brings up screenshots of old and current Gumtree, pinallinfo, eBay adverts etc

The user then does the donkey work of reading them, going through pics etc
 
http://www.pinpedia.com/ already has sales prices, but beware - it also picks up (in error IMHO) listed prices on ebay - even if the item doesn't sell. So you have to discount those, and only look at the ones which actually sold.

Having said this, such a price guide is pretty useless, because: 1. there are simply not enough sales volumes to make the prices statistically worthwhile. 2. There are so many variables within a pinball machine that will affect price - mainly condition of literally 100's of parts. Then when you add mods and upgrades, this makes it almost impossible to do like for like comparisons. There are other factors too - e.g. quality and reputation of the seller; distance from the seller to the buyer is also a factor - can you see & test it before you buy, or are you buying blind? What will it cost to get it from the seller to you? As there are so few sales, prices can be skewed by single purchases - e.g. someone paying a premium to obtain the pin they 'really really want'.

I would suggest all you can do is obtain a general feel for a price range for a particular machine and then adjust for condition/etc.

I have found it useful to look at 'asking prices' here on the forum - that gives a good feel and there are a lot more asking prices published than actual sales prices.

PS - btw, I created and ran a "price guide" website from 2004-2008 which helped collectors of a certain make of pottery to value individual pieces based on retail prices and on recent ebay sales - back then it was very easy to scrape all the ebay sales data directly from ebay and store in a database. I also had the advantage that I had all the historical retail price data for a lot of the items. it was a really successful website - people paid £'s to join and get access to the price database. (In the end I sold the whole website and the database as a going concern business to someone else).
 
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You’d need to agree a class of state for machines...
 
who is this HLD I keep hearing about - I seem to have missed something here - someone or something to avoid ?

Cheers

kev
 
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