Antique Price Guides

Prior to buying or selling antiques, nearly all folks generally browse through antique price guides, and it's usually a printed one that they can hold in their hands and easily reference. In fact, even with just a quick search on sites like eBay or Amazon.com, you can easily find a huge variety of antique guides for sale, which proves both how useful and popular such guides have become. However, some of these guides are much more accurate than others, so it's a good idea to see what other customers have said about the guide that you are specifically interested in before buying it. Now, if you're interested on how they come up with the prices shown in the guide, then read on...

You see, there are  few major factors that generally go in to how an antique price guide comes up with their numbers, and these factors include (but are not limited to) the items rarity and condition quality, as well as the prices that other similar antiques have recently sold for. While rarity and condition can be relatively easy to figure out, the current market price is also a major factor and can be a bit harder to come up with. Generally the current market price can be determined by looking at a collection of stats from the following - prices from similar auctions, price of the item in antique shops, and quotes from antique dealers on what they would pay for such an item. Guides that use all three of these criteria to determine a products value are generally of higher quality and provide more accurate prices than those that only use one or two of those values.

Antique price guides are useful for both buyers and sellers, as they help buyers to ensure that they are not overpaying for an item, and they help sellers to ensure that they, likewise, are getting a fair price for their antique goods. Usually you can't return antiques, so it's particularly important for both parties to ensure that they are happy with the price of the product before the sale occurs, and an collectible price guide can help with that immensely.

As someone who has an interest in both textiles and antiques, I've naturally become interested in antique sewing machines and would love to own one. While I doubt that I'll ever really consider my collection of antiques complete, owning a beautiful old sewing machine would certainly satisfy my antique hunting needs at least for a little while. So, for the past little while I've been researching antique sewing machines and trying to find one to display in my home.

I'm particularly interested in finding an antique Singer sewing machine, as I think it would very interesting to display next to my modern Singer sewing machine. It will be an appealing way to show myself and my visitors just how far such machines have come over the years! Frankly though, I find the old antique versions much more beautiful than the modern machines of today -- even if they don't have all the bells and whistles that we take for granted these days.

Anyhow, here are some gorgeous old sewing machines for your viewing pleasure:

Like many things, antiques are now being sold more and more online, as it becomes an accepted way to sell just about anything, including all kinds of antiques. While some people may be put initially put off of selling antiques online, as it can be hard for buyers to truly inspect and scrutinize pieces, it does allow sellers to reach a much wider audience than they likely would otherwise. Also, good quality pictures and sometimes even video, coupled with an honest seller can lead to many pleasant online sales of antiques.

To make sure that an online antique sale goes as smoothly as possible, buyers should ensure to take high quality photos of the item from as many angles as possible, and try to include some carefully taken video footage as well. Also, sellers should be upfront about any deficincies with the item and provide as much detail as possible.

On the other hand, antique buyers should make use of resources like antique price guides in order to be sure that they are getting a fair price on the item. Furthermore, they should ask any questions they have in advance of the sale, and of course remember that when buying anything it's always "buyer beware" out there. One last tip regarding online antique sales is to remember that shipping on large items such as an antique pine chest of drawers or antique oak furniture  can be quite expensive, and so quotes should be found before the sale when shipping costs are a concern. Furthermore, for expensive antiques it may be wise to use an escrow services, so that funds are not released until the item has been received by the buyer.

So, you've cleaned out your attic or closet and found an old and curious item, maybe an antique cupboard or an antique bookcase. Or perhaps you've inherited an interesting looking item that is no doubt antique and may even be worth a nice sum of money. I mean, it certainly looks very old - but how do you know if it's actually worth anything? For many people, the answer to this question is looking in antique price guides, in order to get a rough idea of how much you might be able to sell your new (old) item for. However, not each antique price guide is created equal and so you want to find a reliable guide and fully understand how to use it.

One way to determine the quality of an antique price guide, is to see if it mentions how the prices are determined. If it doesn't mention how the prices are determined, then stay away as some methods are not very reliable! For example, some antiques price guides will solely use results of similar auctions to determine an average cost. This can be an okay method, so long as many such auctions are taken in to account. If only a small sample of similar auctions are used, unusually high or low bids can seriously skew the accuracy of the antique price guides numbers. In my opinion, it's best to use a guide that uses a combination of methods to determine prices, as those to tend to be the most reliable.