Some questions up for debate:
What is the best way to determine the market value of an item when looking though sold listings: Buy it Nows or Auctions? How should one be weighted versus the other?
What is the market value for the following card? Assume that the $400 sale is not a best offer (it’s not) and is a legitimate sale. Please only use the context provided from the photo:
In general: buy it now. Most people use the buy it now format. Bid auctions have less consistent participation.
For very popular items this can vary. I personally can’t remember the last time I bid on an auction. I will even pay more to get the bird in the hand.
I think that auctions are only good to get rid of things. So if you need money and/or have had something sitting for a long time and need it out.
The thing with auctions is, at maximum you have a 10 day advertising window. So you need to have multiple buyers interested in that time frame, you need to have buyers that find the listing in that time frame, and you need to have buyers that have the money to spend in that time frame.
Buy it now will take longer but will eventually be found by someone that is looking for the card and a deal can be made through that medium eventually.
I don’t really think auctions are a good way to help gauge the value of an item, maybe the absolute minimum value though? A lot of auctions seem to be bid on by flippers anyway to a value.
I’d personally say use the BIN prices and the auctions equally to establish a range. Here, I’d draw a value of $80-100. You always cut outliers. I use outliers as my hopes, not my expectations.
So for example, if I was listing this card for sale on eBay having seen these four listings, I’d put a $150 BIN OBO with an auto-reject at $70. What offers I accept would depend on my timeline for the sale.
So is the Clefable worth $67 or $400?
Would you consider 400 the outlier here, or the 67? The 67 sold within 1 minute of being listed.
Closer to $67 if your impatient, closer to $400 if your patient.
If I’m using sold listings I’m going to use all the data available. More importantly it’s going to depend upon what item I’m trying to buy.
-If I’m buying a common item where there’s always one for sale, I’ll use past sold listings and gear towards the lower end of the average sold price.
-If I’m buying an item that rarely appears, but there’s usually one a few a year, I’ll go for the higher end of the spectrum.
-If it’s an item where there’s only one per year or less, I don’t even bother with the past sales records other than to prevent myself from paying three times what the last one sold for.
I’d consider $400 the outlier, yeah. I’m assuming he wants to actively sell the card. So I priced it with intent to sell in my hypothetical. And also, I’m entertaining his hypothetical wherein these four numbers are the ONLY information I have to go off of. So it wouldn’t make sense for me to assume the $67 is the outlier. It’s much closer to the other two sales. And I can’t see that it sold in 1 minute. I don’t have that information. Just the four sale prices. That’s it.
I would treat 67 and 400 as a outlier and consider 90$ the price i would be willing to pay based solely on the 4 data points.
I would prefer all the info I could get to determine market value but you’d have to be silly to include the 400.00 sale in that calculation. Just remove that one and consider the other three.
I think your perspective is too skewed toward being a seller. My question is not “how much could I sell it for”, but rather “how much is it worth”. As a buyer, it’s worth closer to $67 if I’m patient and $400 if I’m impatient. But if you’re trying to find an objective value of the item, independent from whether or not you’re buying or selling, where would you put it?
If it’s mine I am selling to you it is worth $400 but if I am buying yours then it is worth $67. 
But seriously another extremely important aspect nobody has brought up yet is what is available on the market now? Looking quickly we currently have a BIN at $400 and $350. If the high sale draws out many other sellers (which often times it does) then you can evaluate the high sale as more of a one time deal due to temporary low supply but when drawing out the further supply we can expect some backtracking.
All the time I get people messaging me offers saying the last auction sold for $XX on an item that I am the cheapest BIN listing or the only BIN listing. Usually I reply with “this one won’t”.
I don’t think there is a single objective answer. Even if someone runs the averages, where are the copies available at $67?
Its easy to determine an objective value for items that are consistently available and sell 100’s of times over. This card has a pop of 12, and from a quick search, $349 is the current lowest available option. Therefore until another copy appears for less, whatever the $349 seller and buy can agree on is the answer.
@pkmnflyingmaster what context do you mean market value? I think you are using it as a concrete term when in fact for many illiquid collectible items it just isn’t a reality. I mean if it was in the context of replacement value for insurance purposes then it is worth $350 as that is what it would cost to replace today. If someone however wanted to know what the “value” of their collection was in case they ever had to liquidate it then you would be much safer towards the low end and naturally the auction side of things as that is how one would typically liquidate.
“Market value” isn’t a clear cut thing often times in the collectible world so you aren’t going to get any clear cut answers. The more scarce and illiquid the item is the wider the reasonable range for “market value” you will have regardless of how you are trying to define it.
Although in practice, I would 100% agree that availability is a massive factor to consider, for the sake of this thread I ask that you only consider the information provided in the image.
@smpratte , can you enligten us a bit on how SMR determines market prices
Exactly! Sold items are usually suggestions, not answers.
Given that handcuff of a restriction there just is no good answer.
I would still ask in what context do you mean “market value” or how do you define “market value” for the sake of this question as it is a very ambiguous term when it comes to stuff as illiquid as a PSA 10 expedition clefable holo. I’m actually quite shocked how active the market has already been on this card in the quick start to 2018 we’ve had. Perhaps your definition of “market value” can help in answering it.
For insurance replacement value purposes - $350.
For a person who may need to scrounge up cash at some point soon - $70 or so.
For a person looking to buy one - $67-$350
You asked for opinions and Scott gave you his…then you criticized it? I was afraid to give my opinion. Not really lol.
I think this is the most salient response so far. Many of the differences of opinion are probably based on different underlying definitions of “market value”. Economics is not really a big interest of mine so I don’t often think of these kinds of nuances, haha.
For me, my definition of market value is the place where supply and demand meet. Referring to what smpratte said, the place where a buyer is willing to buy and a seller is willing to sell. If you could acquire data over many sales and take the average, I think that would be a reasonable definition of what I consider “market value”.
But supply and demand is an equilibrium with two sides. After reading the responses here and reviewing my opinion I’d argue that there are two different driving forces for the value of an item. In a situation with plenty of supply, the price is driven by the buyer and I would therefore weigh auction prices over bin sales since auctions are entirely driven by the buyer. In a situation where availability is really low, a buyer has to convince a seller to sell and therefore a bin sale may be weighted more heavily since the seller sets the price there. Whether or not the clefable in this case is driven by buyer or seller is up for debate since it seems to be both scarce and with little demand.
Sorry if my thoughts seem all over the place in this thread, I asked to learn and my opinion has evolved from reading the answers given by people in this thread.
