About a week ago I started following an auction on Ebay for 40 Atlas N scale locomotives. The description listed every locomotive with the model & road name, however there was only one picture showing all of the locos packed into 1 large flat rate shipping box. They said it was an estate find and that each loco had a price tag on the box of $40.00 - $60.00 on it. It did not specify if they were DC or DCC (the seller probably didn’t know) but the original prices led me to believe they were DC. The starting bid was $199.00 and I figured I would try to pick them up, keep the ones I wanted & sell the rest off individually possibly making a few bucks. Since they were listed “mint in box” I figured paying between $400.00 & $600.00 for the lot would be reasonable.
Well, before I decided to put in my first bid it had gone well above that. When the auction finally ended the winning bid was $1635.00.
I knew they weren’t going to go cheap, but I never imagined they would bring that much with the lack of photos in the listing.
Hope the buyer is happy with their purchases and gets their $1635 worth out of it. If an item has either little or no photos or the photos are blurry and non-descript, I move onto the next auction. The better the picture; the more helpful it is in determining whether an item or items is worth it’s asking price.
Not too many individual modelers are going to shell out $1,600 at one time, and most modelers would have no interest in 40 more locos, at least not at one time.
My guess is that the winner is a re-seller, hoping to sell individual locos at a higher price than the average of $40 that he paid per loco.
Yeah that’s got to be a flipper. Expect to see auctions and BINs start showing up for those Atlas N scale locos in the near future, assuming the buyer actually gets 40 locos for that price. Per loco, it is indeed a good deal.
If I knew I could get $65-$70 per loco flipping them I would have done it but that was a lot of coin to drop & not knowing how long I would have to sit on some of them. Last year I dropped $540 on a box full of KATO locos (I don’t remember how many) I kept 2 for my layout & flipped the rest of them netting about $100 in the end. I never owned a KATO before but after I ran these on my layout everyhing else I owned ended up on the auction block!
Note the bold lettered two word addition to the above quote. We THINK the seller has the original boxes. If the locos are new or gently used the buyer got a deal. If they have been, “Rid hard and put away wet,” not so good.
I recall a kiddy bicycle returned to a store in the original box, allegedly never assembled. The customer got a full refund. When the box was opened so we could assemble it for sale (as an obsolete one-of-a-kind) it was obvious that the customer’s kid(s) had ridden it into the ground - after which it was fully disassembled, the parts wrapped in Saran, put back into the original box and returned looking like new…