[WTB] Find accurate values of used gear

Tim Miller

Tim Miller

Well-known member
Mods please move if it shouldn’t be posted here, I wasn’t sure where.

A company I did some work for in the past contact me about wanting to unload a bunch of video equipment. They want pay me to price the stuff for them. Where is the best place to get some accurate prices for the used gear? I was thinking eBay. Any other options to keep it relatively easy for me?

Thanks.
 
Seconded. It can be a little weird, as some things will have a great range that they've sold for with seemingly no difference in the listings, but I don't know what else you could do.
 
Ebay “sold” listings show the supply-demand price..... but, ebay also has a large amount of artists willing to off load gear when they are either desparate, or maybe they have already made their money and care little how much they make. Some retired guys sell cheaply too. You can generally make more if you hold onto gear.

The prices of gear that you see on ebay is generally higher than the worth, so those ones sit there for a long time. If you search the sold listings, as Jcs and josh bass mentioned, it tends to reflect the lower end of the prices.

For example i bought something at $1500 off ebay, and later ended up selling it. People were looking up the “sold” listing price on ebay and offering me $1500. Some even told me that they had searched the price, and that i was listing above what it was worth. So i sold it locally on craigslist for $2200. Why? Because it was actually worth at leas $2k. I just got lucky on an auction, but all the savvy enayers had a skewed idea of the products worth because, ironically, they were seeing what i luckily bought it for, not the actual price. Does that make sense?
 
It's actually called "Completed Items" on eBay! This will gives you the REAL value of practically any item you want to sell!
 
Ebay is just full of low ballers these days. Everyone knows how to look up the lowest price something sold for and runs with that. I list on ebay, but end up selling locally for some things. Just depends. Ebay is great for reaching a wide set of buyers, but Pricing is so relative there.

If you list something at $5000, someone will ask for $2500. Then lower the price to $2500, and someone offers $1250. Ebay is a not a good indication of the actual price. You kind of have to know how things are used and what the demand is in relation to the availability.

With how cheap new gear is now, the used market has slimmer margins than before.
 
eBay sets used prices now, whether we like it or not. There have always been outliers in any price index, but that doesn't change the fact that units actually changed hands for those prices. Nobody is forced to lower prices just because somebody offers, and holding out has always been a valid method to get a higher offer if a seller can wait, but the fact that somebody did pay less at some point does lower the average and that's not a pretend value.

This is true of any used market, not just camera gear. Large internet marketplaces have changed the game completely.

I disagree about one major point talked about here, however - it's not 100% just the completed listings that set the price, what something is available for right now via Buy It Now often contributes greatly to defining what something is worth at any point in time, perhaps more so than completed listings. Completed listings are useless when one actually wants to buy something, tbh.

I wish this weren't so, I honestly think my 2 Jaunt Ones are worth more than that - but the truth is that they really aren't, despite what they were selling for 6 months ago.

Hold out, don't take lowballs - nobody is forcing anybody to do so.
 
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