what resources do you use?

The guy that runs the bodega down the block 🤣

To be honest I don't "collect" and have nothing of significant enough value to need to look up, so can't help you.
 
Quite often I use the prices found in the Exchange section of the Forum. This at least provides a “price range” when contemplating a purchase.
 
I don't rely on any one source. I try to gather several different examples and use them to estimate. I use a combination of Arizona Customs, Ebay, a few different knife forums, and whatever else Google has to offer (like other auction and pre-owned knife sales sites).

I have learned not to rely too heavily on Arizona Customs, as I've seen some excessively high prices there. I've seen pre-owned knives sell there for $50 to $60 more than the very same models of knives still available for sale new at the exact same time as the pre-owned sales.

I'd say determining a price for a pre-owned knife is just as much art as science.

And in the end, a knife is worth whatever someone else is willing to pay. Monetarily speaking.
 
Nothing exotic or terribly expensive in my inventory.
I shop around online when buying and they get put in a drawer after I find the next great purchase.
So far I haven’t been motivated to sell.
 
I consult the three of us:
Me, myself, and I...
If it doesn't feel right: my hands stay in my pockets!
 
The Knife Exchange here is pretty much the only resource that I use, of course in addition to knife dealers' websites for the original retail prices. Not sure about the flea bay as many knives there are significantly overpriced.
 
I'll cross reference several reputable dealers for new/former values, and then go from there; new hard to find, discontinued, maybe go a bit higher, but if carried, used, sharpened, etc. go an appropriate fair bit lower.
 
I've bought & sold a lot of knives and I mainly use EB & ACK to judge the value of a vintage or discontinued knife that I am thinking about buying or selling because they are only the reliable sources of publicly available data for current knife sales.

If the knife is still in production, then dealer/mfgr pricing would also come into play to set a ceiling on the value of the knife.

If I happen to see a sale here on BF, I'll use it as a data point too but sellers here all too often delete their asking price for a knife that they have sold for NO GOOD REASON, IMO, such that doing a search for prior sales yields few or no useable results. So, I don't even bother trying to do that here anymore.

Setting a sales price for a knife that I want to sell based on the data I find usually involves throwing out the highest and lowest #'s and offering the knife somewhere in between depending on how badly I want to sell it.

If you have not set the price correctly, the "market" will let you know it because no one will buy it and no one will even ask you about it, in which case the price is probably too high . . . OR, the knife will sell in a blink of an eye, in which case you have probably set the price too low.

This, of course, presumes that there is "some" level of demand for the knife you want to sell.

If no one wants what you're offering, no matter how desireable YOU think it is, it will not sell no matter how you price it.

I've often seen this happen here on BF which is a very narrow and fickle market.

On the other hand, if the knife priced "right" on EB or ACK, it will ALWAYS sell w/in a reasonable period of time because those sites attract buyers WORLDWIDE & if you can't sell a knife there, you can't sell it anywhere.

I have ALWAYS been able to sell any knife that I wanted to sell here or on EB for a price that I was willing to accept, even if it wasn't equal to or greater than the price that I paid for it.

I've never tried to sell a knife on ACK because of their 25% consignment fee and because I have issues with the consignment sales process, but I have bought several knives there for what I considered a reasonable price.
 
Last edited:
sgt1372 said:
If I happen to see a sale here on BF, I'll use it as a data point too but sellers here all too often delete their asking price for a knife that they have sold for NO GOOD REASON, IMO, such that doing a search for prior sales yields few or no useable results. So, I don't even bother trying to do that here anymore.
Click to expand...

Hear, hear!
 
One thing for those not that familiar with ebay. Don't just do a search for the knife in question, as that will only provide active listings, so you'll only see what sellers are asking, which is meaningless. Use the Advanced Search feature and search for Sold Listings to see what they're actually selling for.
 
Last edited:
sgt1372 said:
but sellers here all too often delete their asking price for a knife that they have sold for NO GOOD REASON, IMO, such that doing a search for prior sales yields few or no useable results.
Click to expand...

This doesn't help looking backwards, but I subscribe to email notifications for the categories I care about and save all the email.
 
Ebay completed listings and old forum listings.

Books are already 1-3 years old by the time they're out. Dealers are ok, but specialist dealers tend to make more than the open market. Also some of the big ones can artificially inflate or deflate the market based on what they have, and what they are trying to hype. Something like ACK is good for checking old custom knives, just remember that one example is a starting point, not the final answer. You never know if you're dealing with a super fan that just had to have it.
 
Knife Swap on Reddit. Forum rules require that sellers keep the price listed after a transaction.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top