LKCA vs. HA

Buyers and sellers often speculate – Which auction house realizes higher prices? Which auction house is better for buyers?

We have been both buyers and sellers, privately and through auction houses. Here is a comparison of a small sample of data, comparing Lyn Knight Currency Auctions to Heritage Auctions.

This data must be viewed as a very small slice of the overall Friedberg catalog, and over a narrow window of time.

We placed various lots at both auction houses between September and early March – lots with identical Friedberg numbers, with identical TPG grading services and identical grades. While this may not seem like much data, consider all the data we omitted. For example, if two lots sold in the same time frame, one graded PMG 65 and the other PCGS 65, we excluded them because they didn’t meet our strict comparison criteria. For Heritage, we took data from our sales at Long Beach in September 2006 and FUN in January 2007. For Lyn Knight, we drew from our sales at PCDA October 2006 and CPMX March 2007.

Here are the results – first for Heritage:

 

Here are the Lyn Knight results:
 

What follows are the results of putting both auction houses side by side for the above data:

We summarized the data by both average price and median price for each auction house – here are the results.

From this limited data, it appears that Lyn Knight realized higher prices for consigners. This is obviously good news for sellers and not-so-good news for buyers.

While these results represent a very small sample of all possible grades of all possible Friedberg numbers, we believe they signify something. We think that Heritage sales, like FUN, include many of the same Friedberg number. This hurts sellers relative to Lyn Knight, which seems to be more careful in offering fewer of the same type notes. On the other hand, Heritage auctions like FUN may be good for buyers, due to the increased volume of notes.