The market for antiques and other collectibles is inefficient and daunting to nonexperts. WorthPoint, a new website, thinks technology is the answer
The prices of stocks and bonds update many times a second. Will Seippel, the founder of the website WorthPoint, says it should be almost as easy to get a fair price on your antique or collectible.
He has quite a challenge ahead of him, say experts on the market for collectibles, which can include any object that has some resale value?from ancient coins to 19th century furniture to vintage Led Zeppelin T-shirts. Almost everyone owns collectibles, but very few people know how to determine their value. In a market this large, inefficient, and opaque, "it's very difficult to know when you're getting a fair price on something," says Christopher Didier, a managing director at Robert W. Baird's family wealth-management group.
Seippel tells a story of a jeweler offering his mother $25 for a gold coin that he knew contained about $250 in gold. Technology can help avoid these situations, he says. A "better armed" collector "is going to do better," he says.
For subscriptions costing $10 to $50 per month, WorthPoint allows users to gauge the value of their own collectibles?or collectibles they want to buy?by searching through sales records of similar items. For each item, ranging from baseball cards to classic cars, users can see photos, descriptions, prices paid, and where and when they were sold. So far, the WorthPoint database contains records of 73 millions items bought and sold, and it adds 3 million to 5 million each month.
Opposite of Snooty
Unlike more established sites aimed at appraisers or dealers, WorthPoint is aimed at the general public. It focuses on "stuff that the everyday person would have in [his] house," Seippel says. "There are great people in our industry, [but] you can get screwed. My goal is to make this more transparent [and] more fun."
To make the site more entertaining to browsers, WorthPoint spotlights interesting items in its database, like a 1916 quarter-dollar coin sold at auction in 2006 for $18,400, or a 1957 Mickey Mantle baseball card sold on eBay for $152.50 in 2007. The site's "worthologists"?experts on particular types of collectibles?write articles on such topics as circus memorabilia or Chinese porcelain.
WorthPoint, which was launched in 2007, is seeing a surge in traffic as it adds more data. According to comScore, the site received 2.76 million unique visitors in December 2010, more than three times its traffic a year earlier. WorthPoint says it has boosted its number of paid subscribers 40 percent since October, to 14,000.
How Used is "Used"
Some are skeptical. Novice collectors should know there are important pieces of information that no website can provide, says Elizabeth Stewart, an appraiser in Santa Barbara, Calif., with 26 years of experience. Although Stewart is a WorthPoint subscriber who uses Web research as a starting point in appraisals, she says collectors need an eye for subtleties such as condition?which is not always apparent in an online photo?or a knowledge of the tastes of the top collectors of each kind of item. "Each category of collectibles has its own wildcard," she says. "Really great collectors live, eat, and breathe their material."
One prominent competitor in antiques and collectibles is a company called Prices4Antiques, while several other well-established sites tackle the art market. All the sites compile photos, descriptions, and other data from auctions or other sales, allowing collectors, appraisers, and dealers to check on values by looking up the transactions of similar items. The art market is on its way to being more of a "valid asset class," says George Collins, president and chief executive of the website AskART.com. "Years ago, the art market was jump ball," with the outcome of each transaction unpredictable, he says. "Now there's a lot more confidence in taking action."
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