State of the Vintage Market

OK All. Throwing this out there to get your thoughts. Let me start by saying my observations are based around the items I have an interest in - this includes pre 1940s sports antiques like equipment and other memorabilia display items.

It seems to me that the amount of quality vintage items out there for sale has dramatically tailed off in the past 6 months. Is supply really starting to dry up that much? Theoretically it should be no surprise that supply will eventually shrink up. As we know vintage items are a fixed supply - you can’t create more antiques like you can the new shiny crap this is produced in volumes everyday. Whatever is out there is it!! Demand on the other hand, it would seem, should only increase. As time goes by more and more people should become interested in acquiring vintage items, while supply is only getting smaller. Collectors are spending increasing amounts on quality items, and scarce items are being horded into collections. One can expect that these quality items will become more and more scarce, but are we seeing a dramatic realization of that now?? Mind you it’s not like I can ever dream of affording most of these quality items, but I do like to see them available on ebay, Mastro, REA and other acutions so I can gawk and one day hope to own.

10 years ago eBay really started to take off. This opened up the flood gates for the supply of vintage items as tons and tons of items hit the market and became available to collectors. This great ease of availability also fueled greater demand. For years now it has seemed like supply would never end. But recently it seems like the floods have dramatically receded and the pool of quality items has shrunk dramatically. We knew it could not last forever, as there is just so much supply out there, but the shrinkage now appears dramatic.

Since October ebay has dried up in my opinion. Most recent major auctions have been disappointing. The majority of items you see now are ‘retreads’ that we have seen sold before. Collectors are buying up the quality items and they are not likely to let them go for a long time, if ever. There are certainly exceptions and differences, depending on what you collect. Quality Leather Football helmets, for example, are pretty common and numerous on the market, but their prices are exceptionally high as demand is huge for them. Soon their micro-market will dry up too, as has the macro-market, and with time it will be very very hard to find a quality vintage football helmet.

So what does this hold for the collector that is just starting out? Have they missed the boat? One could argue yes. There are a lot of common items out there, but if they are interested in quality scarcer items the forecast is that they will be harder and harder to find and will cost a lot to obtain.

We have seen so much change in the past 10 years. What does the next 10 years hold? What will the market be like 10 years from now? Will it be next to impossible to obtain quality items?

What are your thoughts?

-Joe