Hello
@K-man:
I looked at the list of guns and at first glance, I wouldn't want to own or invest into a single thing in the whole auction. It reads like a textbook "this is how to leave your kids with less money in your estate than had you just bought bonds and CDs"
Reasons I'm likely right:
-Lots of production modern guns. Even if there is some amateur collector appeal to one of the brands or another, the odds that they are 100% condition, never touched, mint box, new old stock are very slim. This is the problem for people that collect modern production guns. They made a million of every model, so scarcity of guns does not exist, only scarcity of condition exists. I don't buy guns to own where a humid day damages the box reducing the value of the gun 10%, nor do I buy a gun where shooting one round from the rifle reduced the gun's value by 30% or more. I also know there will be a hundred side-liners running around bidding up pedestrian production guns to dumb prices. A sort of redneck flea market. (confession: I'm a redneck, I certainly have been to many fleamarkets)
Reasons I might be wrong:
-Never-heard-of-them auction houses are notoriously bad at appraising guns. So what they say is a factory production gun could be a best custom gun. That springfield, winchester, mauser, or other such gun listed in the roster could end being a Biesen, Niedner, Griffin, Sedgley, Ramirez, Hough, or any of a score of best makers of the 20th century. $10,000 errors in description do occasionally happen. All the guns look like ~$1000 guns, if a $20,000 gun is actually at the auction, it's unlikely the attendees will have $4000 to bid it up to 1/5th actual value.
-A couple of guns went through the hands of Champlin arms. Are those factory nothing-burger guns or did those get into JJ's hands where they had $5000+ in custom work done to them? Don't know.
My time is valuable, so I usually avoid wasting a dollar in gas to go check these types of auctions out, but a person that always carries emergency "Deal cash" on them and stumbles into these sales with an open mind and good eye will find a deal 1/10th of the time. It's a question of what your time is worth and are you ready to drop $5,000-$20,000 on the spot if you find the deal of a lifetime?
Biggest mistake I ever made: I was going into times of lean finances and I didn't have the normal cash I purposely set aside for buying guns that I did in better years. I once passed on a gun for $6500, buying only its twin for slightly less than that. The one I passed on turned out to be a quarter of a million-dollar (or more) gun. A bitter story for another time. Always have benjamins ready.
The best collectors I know are middle-class, humble people with the self-discipline to carry $10,000 in cash with them everywhere they go, yet they have the self-discipline to not blow it foolishly. Those guys are the ones with the epic collections because no man knows the day nor hour that the finest guns in the world appear for sale too cheap. The guy with the most physical cash at that moment wins the day, usually at 1/20th of fair market value to an auctioneer that couldn't care less what he's selling.
www.gunsamerica.com
www.naturabuy.fr
