antique appraisal
One thing that is for certain is if you want to get into the antique furniture business percieved value can make a world of difference. If you were to ever make a living off of lets say victorian furniture you'll either have to know a good price to buy it at or know a good price to sell it at. This is where a good antique appraisal would come in. Antique appraisals can tell you exactly what your antique furniture is worth. They'll give you tons of details regarding the age of your antiques, the damage, they have ways of even finding out who the original owner was. And all of this stuff, yet time consuming can be very valuable to the average antiques collector.
wouldnt it be great to go in your grandparents basement and find some old antique table lamps from their grandparents. Well if you know anything about antiques you would probably get happy if you found the antique mirrror in good shape. Well your first inclination should be to go to an antique dealer and get an appraisal. This will either confirm your high hopes of making thousands with your grandparents antiques or prove to be a dud.
Now what you want the antique appraiser to do is actually give you a fair market value, but the good question is how to know what antique furniture is worth. Reason being is this will give you more knowledge about pricing. if you know you have an antique thats worth $500,000 dollars and thats fair value you now know that $500,000 would be your MINIMUM selling price. and anything over is just pure profit. This is good knowledge to have as a seller this is why finding a good antique appraisal is not an option because look at it like this. If you get the wrong antique appraisals you could ultimately lose thousands on the closing price if they valued your precious antique wrong. so make sure you put in the hard time to get a correct appraisal. I would even try going to atleast 3-5 different antique appraisals this way you can kind get an average value of your antique.
remember-- antiques are only worth what somebody is willing to pay for it, so almost every antique appraisal will be different but if correct they should be somewhat similar.
Also another good thing about an antique appraisal is the dreaded antique reproductions, because you will never really figure out how to know what antique furniture is worth. If you go to an antique auction and spend $60,000 you probably want an original antique piece but guess what. Theres millions of people everyday looking to rip of kind people like me and you by making antique reproductions and then marketing them as original pieces from the 1700's. Heres a story about a lady who died 2 years ago at the age of 95. this lady had always really been into antique collecting and one day she managed to get some antique dishes for what seemed to be a fair price. Well she bout this at age 23 and held on to it forever, obviously she was expecting to get rich ..which is a good thing to do buy and antique then hold on to it for a long time and then sale it. well she held onto her antique dishes until she was 90. she said her plans were to sell them and use the money for lung surgery that she knew she would need because she developed cancer from smoking. Well she took the dishes to an antique appraisal an the guy said ma'am these are worth maybe $20 bucks. Not believeing him she took the antiques to 6 more antique dealers to get an appraisal and everyone else gave her a value of below $15 bucks. Well the last guy told her that the pieces were fakes and had no value so she ended up dying, of lung cancer and the dishes were diposed of. antique reproductions can hurt your financial stability greatly until you learn how to know what antique furniture is worth.
Dont let this happen to you make sure that you do your research when buying antiques. and always, always, always get a decent antique appraisal before actually paying money to buy an antique.
