This Antique Furniture Appraisal Guide Can Make You Money
Home Appraisals
I use this as a starting place because it’s something most of us have some experience with and can help us understand less familiar fields like antique furniture appraisal. There are endless factors to consider when trying to determine the value of a home you’d like to sell or a property you’re considering buying. Sure, in the end, it still all comes down to supply and demand – do you have something others want, and how many similar options do they have? The trick is figuring out that equation in real life with all its variations and complications. That’s where things get interesting!
It’s still good to have a real estate agent, but whether you’re looking to buy or sell, the first thing they’ll probably do is bring you pretty color printouts of “comparables” – similar properties in the area which have sold in the past six months and details of their square footage, features, condition, and selling price. That’s possible because of the internet. And the changes don’t stop there.
We’ll soon be unveiling a consumer-friendly and fully loaded version of appraisal power in something we call “accūRATE.” Imagine having full access to the sorts of detailed appraisals professionals provide for mortgage lenders from certified appraisers who’ve actually walked the property and evaluated the details of its location, amenities, condition, and features – all about as easily as you check social media to see what the people running the country have said or done to horrify you today.
So what is a particular home worth? Is it worth what it cost to build it – three decades or three months ago? Perhaps. Is it worth what it would take to replace it if it tragically burned to the ground? The insurance company certainly thinks so. Is it worth what similar homes in the area have sold for in recent months, plus or minus adjustments for the jacuzzi and the problems in the basement? That seems fair. None of that means, however, that the next young couple to tour the home will buy it for the price established by any or all of these factors. Their wants and needs might be completely different. Maybe it’s worth what someone else will pay for it – supply and demand.
Antique Furniture Appraisal
In the same way, a house can have different sorts of values for different purposes, antique furniture can be evaluated in different ways. We’d all love to think that table or jewelry box we inherited from Grammy is as valuable in terms of dollars and cents as it is to us emotionally, but that’s not how it works. Like homes, antiques have different values depending on your goals and on who’s doing the evaluating.
How Much Was It Worth?
First, it matters how valuable it was to begin with. Whether an item is a century or a decade old, furniture quality tends to matter a great deal because people want to be able to both display and use the item. Antique chairs you can’t sit in or antique cabinets you can’t store things in may look fine at a museum, but they’re not particularly useful. Most valuable antiques were good pieces when they were made and remain good pieces all these years later.
How Rare Is It?
It also matters how rare an item is. As with anything else, if you can find dozens of them at any thrift store, what you have is probably not super-valuable. That doesn’t mean it’s no good or you can’t love it, just that it’s unlikely to pay off those student loans for you. Hand-in-hand with that is a need for demand. An item can be very rare and still, no one cares because they don’t want it or need it. Most antiques with value have that value partly because they’re cool and look nice and people want them in their homes. Betamax movies may be rare as well, but that doesn’t mean they’re valuable – no one wants them.
How Useful Is It?
Finally, there’s the issue of purpose. Antique furniture appraisal of the sort you see on Antiques Road Show is mostly for fun and focused largely on the potential sale price of an item. We learn a little history, we oooh and aaah and wish we’d found that rare chamber pot or whatever, but nothing determined there is legally or economically binding – and that’s OK.
Get a Professional Appraiser
If we’re needing to insure an item or divide up property because of a death or a divorce, that’s a different type of antique furniture appraisal altogether. The courts or insurance company may let me choose from reputable furniture appraisers near me, or they may require specific credentials or licensing from those doing the evaluations. Those online antique furniture appraisals are fun, and many really do use the experts and techniques they brag about on their sites, but they’re rarely accepted by insurers or judges. For most valuables – antiques, collectibles, toys, jewelry, and especially art – a truly legitimate appraisal requires an in-person examination and time for the appraiser to do some research and investigation unique to that item. You’ll usually pay a reasonable fee for their time and expertise as well.
It’s not a bad idea to get a professional appraisal even if your primary goal is to sell the item. Hopefully, you can see the inherent conflict in asking the dealer you’re hoping will buy something from you what that item is worth. It’s one thing if you’re trying to pawn a watch and aren’t sure if you can get $20 or $25 for it. It’s another if you’re selling a music box that someone told you should be worth $2,500 but you’ve only been offered $400.
A professional appraiser will be accredited by an appropriate organization (such as the Appraisers Association of America) in your state or region. Their report will include a full, technical description of the item being appraised as well as the precise methods used to appraise it. They’ll often distinguish between fair market value and estimated replacement costs. They may charge up to several hundred dollars an hour, but that’s to be expected. Avoid appraisers who suggest a percentage of the total value. That practically guarantees a distorted estimation.
For this same reason, legitimate appraisers won’t mix appraising with buying or selling. If you need antique furniture appraisal for an item of substantial value, it’s worth paying a little to a professional appraiser before shopping it to other potential buyers.
Consider Online Price Guides
This or printed guidebooks are less expensive options. These can be an excellent starting place to find out if what you have is worth taking to a professional appraiser. These guides can often save you the trip by discovering that the cool thing you have is actually rather common or not particularly valuable, although you may periodically discover that you should make that trip after all. Don’t forget that it’s also supposed to be fun to learn about this stuff and wonder if you have or might come across that rare Shaker curio cabinet or that mythological rug hand-woven by blind nuns or whatever. It’s not just about the money!
Online Antique Furniture Appraisal
One of my favorite places to start is the Getty Research Institute. They’ve compiled a list of their favorite places for online appraisals of old books, maps, or other historical collectibles, including – of course – antique furniture.
I found it fun to browse even when I wasn’t trying to get an appraisal.
ValueMyStuff.com is the creation of a former director at Sotheby’s of London. It’s one of the more reputable and customer-friendly appraisal sites out there and has sections for a variety of things you may want appraised – including antique furniture appraisal.
A similar site (with flashier graphics) is WhatSellsBest.com. They have common categories like antiques and art and a number of less common options like Motorcycles and Video Games.
They’ve been utilized by periodicals like Huffington Post and The Guardian as well as television programs like Fox Business and CBS News among others and have a reputation for being easy to use.
A few sites which seem to have established themselves but which I haven’t used personally include…
A subscription-based site with a convenient and welcoming chat feature on the main page.
It takes a “how much stuff has actually sold for here and there and there and here” approach, along with endless high-quality photos.
This site blends online antique furniture appraisal with an effort to educate the rest of us about the antiques being appraised.
What Makes Something Valuable?
It sounds like a simple question, and it is – except when it isn’t. Here’s what I mean…
At the most basic, any item or service’s value is a function of two and only two things – supply and demand. How much of it is there, and how badly do people want it?
The Law of Supply and Demand
McDonald’s has built an empire on cranking out fast food millions and millions of people want to buy and eat every day. There’s plenty of demand. They also make millions and millions of burgers, fries, and things starting with “Mc.” You can find a McDonald’s almost anywhere. There’s plenty of supply. That’s why they’re able to keep their prices so cheap – they make a lot and sell a lot. Not one Quarter Pounder is particularly valuable.
On the other hand, some of you may remember the Christmas shopping season of 1983 when Cabbage Patch dolls were suddenly a big deal. They’d been around for a few years, but for some reason, they took off that year and everyone wanted to buy them for their kids (or themselves) for Christmas. Suddenly, you couldn’t find them anyway – and the crowds quickly grew restless. Some grew violent. If you did come across one, you wouldn’t be picking it up for the sticker price of $25 or $30. Maybe you could convince someone to give theirs up for $75, or $100.
A few years later it was Teddy Ruxpin, that creepy bear that read stories from a cassette you plugged into its back. In the mid-1990s it was Beanie Babies, then Tickle-Me-Elmo. More recently, in 2014, Disney’s Elsa doll from Frozen was unexpectedly difficult to find. Each time, the price of these toys doubled or tripled due to low supply and high demand. You see the same thing with concert tickets the day they go on sale or each new iPhone release. Note that it doesn’t matter whether the item is inherently useful or likely to be eternally rare – we’re not talking N95 masks or diamond drill bits here, and eventually, you can buy as many iPhones as you want.
It all comes down to whether or not people want it, when they want it, and whether or not it’s hard to get.
Messing With the System
Like anything else involving humans or the economy, it’s not always as straightforward in practice as it is on paper. High demand doesn’t always raise prices. In the early days of the first Covid-19 lockdowns in March 2020 (that already seems like a long, long time ago, doesn’t it?) it became difficult to find normal household items like toilet paper or cleaning supplies. Before long it was seemingly random grocery items – pizza sauce, almost any pasta-related item, onion soup mix, and anything else you could use to make hearty meals for an entire family stuck at home. Then it was meat – everything from frozen chicken strips to ground beef.
But the prices didn’t change. Not noticeably. Grocery stores more interested in the long game simply limited supplies and did their best to bring in substitutions or weird off-brands until they could get more of what people really wanted. The supply was low, the demand was high, but the provider manipulated the system to keep the price pretty much what it was in order to avoid bad press and to try to do right by their customers.
Other times, companies try to emphasize or even artificially create a sense of scarcity to push sales or bump up prices. If you ever watch those home shopping channels or if you do much shopping online, you’ve probably noticed how often the information next to an item includes something like “2 remaining in stock” or “next day delivery if ordered in the next 1 hour, 13 minutes.” High-end auto makers often allow backorders of months or years for premium sports cars or luxury vehicles, knowing that making them hard to get increases their status.
You may remember the comic book craze of a few decades back when every new title was branded a “collector’s edition” even though they were printing literally millions of them. Maybe it was issued with seven different covers or some other feature intended to make it “special,” but when you print millions of something it doesn’t matter how nice it is – it’s not and it’s never going to be “rare.”
Trading cards, on the other hand (with or without the stick of bubble gum), understood that it was fine to have hundreds of “common” cards as long as you had a handful of “rare” cards randomly mixed in, thus making the entire package more valuable. In this case, “valuable” simply meant kids would keep buying 69-cent packages long after they had most of the cards in hopes of snagging that one rare card they didn’t have.
Over time, however, these things tend to balance out. The stores get more toilet paper, and the comic shops rarely manage to sell that mass-released title for much above cover price. Other items become rare and valuable without any particular intent – vintage signs or clothes or My Little Pony. The Beatles’ vinyl album “Yesterday And Today” with the original cover (the lads dressed as butchers with mangled dolls all around them, a protest of what Capitol Records was doing to their albums in the states) sells for several thousand dollars. On the other hand, the very first VideoDisc movie (think CDs, but the size of a vinyl album and for playing movies), “Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown,” which is also fairly hard to find, is available on eBay for under $10.
You just never know.
The Internet Changes Everything
It’s hard to remember life before cell phones and internet access. How did we function? It must have been boring, lying around the cave all day sketching wild game on the walls with a charred stick. The thing I genuinely can’t fathom is going out to dinner or meeting with friends while my kids were with a babysitter or parents and none of us owned pagers, let alone actual phones. In an emergency, they’d have to phone the restaurant or the home of whoever we were with. It’s like our entire lives took place in grainy black and white film. I’m not even sure we had sound.
Now that the 21st century is fully underway, everything is different – including the world of appraisals. Remember when you used to have to flip through Consumer Reports magazines or go to the library to find “blue book” values before you went car shopping? It was an all-day event because at bare minimum you’d be trapped at the dealer for at least three hours while they pretended to take your offers back and forth to someone named “Gary” in the office upstairs and you couldn’t leave because they’d taken your driver’s license to “make a photocopy” – and that was about 45 minutes ago.
Today you walk in having already selected a car from their online inventory, or at least carrying a printout showing their dealer cost, the average selling price in your region, and proof the guy across town has it in the color you actually like if you can’t get the deal you want here.
Know Your Worth. Visit the Accury Store NOW.
Today you can find people promising you accurate values of everything from antique furniture appraisal to lunchboxes to costume jewelry to first edition books. You can even buy and sell the names (well, the URLs, to be more accurate) of websites – meaning there are sites to estimate the value of purely digital property as well.
From the newest, most innovative items to the oldest antiques, you have choices now that were inconceivable even a few decades ago – and many of which don’t even require leaving the house. Most are genuine enough – that’s not the tricky part. The tricky part is being clear on exactly what sort of evaluation you’re actually getting and what it does and doesn’t mean. I know that I value my stuff, and I want others to value it as well. That’s not always how it works, however.
Conclusion
Take your time with antique furniture appraisal and be honest with yourself about your goals. Read up on the field yourself and do a little research not just on the dollar value of items but the history behind them. Most of all, don’t forget to appreciate the beauty of antiques or other items aside from their estimated value.
If you choose to sell at a profit, that’s awesome. If it turns out you’re not able to get what you’d hoped, but still need the cash, maybe we can help. We don’t appraise antique furniture, but we do know a thing or two about connecting people to reputable online lenders and helping individuals build (or rebuild) their credit and take more effective control of their personal or small business finances. It’s entirely up to you at every step, of course – but we’d love to learn more about what you’re trying to accomplish and how we might be able to help you get there.
Plus, this way you get to keep your antique desk, unusual ceramics, or rare Bay City Rollers lunch box.