We are going through the same thing that is happening in the cattle market and to a degree with 1st gen Colt SAAs.
In 2013, 2014, and 2015 it was really easy to make record prices in the cattle market. You could buy a 1st year heifer, breed her and feed her on cheap grass spring to fall and then sell her when the price for her had almost doubled. People who had no history or experience in the cattle market saw this and started buying heifers for crazy prices because the prices were obviously just gonna continue to go up. Then all of a sudden in 2016 they stopped going up. So drug store cowboys who had bought 4 to $5,000 heifers were waiting for their easy money. It didn't come and prices not only stalled they started falling. My advice at the time was if you weren't willing to wait the 5-10 year cycle for prices to come back up, sell and get out with as much as you can. Many stubbornly refused. They weren't going to sell those valuable heifers until they could get their money for them. 3.5 years later some of them are still waiting to get their price, and have continued to lose money of grazing leases, death loses, falling calf prices, etc. These are people who knew very little about cattle and have no interest in long term cattle ranching, but they are going to stubbornly refuse to sell at a loss, and those 4-5k heifers are going to be dead before the market gets that high again and will have turned into 10k losses. They could have sold out early when the market started turning and gotten out with little loss.
The same thing is happening with 1st gen colt SAAs. People see what an old worn Colt SAA from the 7th Cav with a kopec letter sells for and decide every worn out beat to hell Colt SAA that is a 1st gen is a guaranteed investment grade piece regardless of condition. So you have a lot of 1st gen colts that have set on GI and GB and other sights for a very long time that have no business being priced at more than 1000 to 1200 bucks maybe just because of their age and the history they represent, not so much the gun they still are. You see it too with Winchester Rifles. People decided anything that was a pre 1900 1873 in 44-40 was a 3000 dollar gun. Or anything that had the numbers 1886 on it was big money. Those guns sit while ones that are priced in the right area code sell.
It's no different with Parkers. The parker came to represent a guaranteed easy sell when you wanted to get out of them. In my part of the world, prior to internet sales, a parker was rare because there just weren't very many. I lived in Houston and can count on 2 hands the number of parkers I ever saw for sell at that time in stores and 3 quarters of those were at Collector's Firearms. They weren't rare guns, but they were hard to find because of geography and such. Even respectable experienced gun dealers get into these situations. Pug's been sitting on a BHE for as long as I have been in the parker game that he has refused to come down on the price of, so it sits in his shop collecting dust. Collector's firearms has a BHE as well that is even more overpriced and less collectible than the one Pug has, neither seems to be interested in moving off their price. Frankly, I can't see either of those guns ever selling, without some movement on their price. If you look at Steve Barnett's page, he has a bunch of Parkers, and when I conversed with him about looking for a 1/2 frame DHE 12, he claimed he has more than 100 parkers that aren't even on the sight (only 1/2 frame he has is a BHE...I didn't inquire about the price), you can also look at the prices he has had them listed for vs what he was selling them for a year or 2 ago. Suddenly just about anything with Parker on them is a much higher markup than it was previously for similar condition guns. He has actually raised the price on that Rondell CHE that is incorrect, his cheapest D grade is over 5 grand for a restoration, he wants almost 3 grand for a poor condition 12 ga VH. These guns aren't moving because people aren't being realistic about what they are worth and we don't currently have a bunch of people coming in that are just desperate to buy any parker they can find as has been the case in the past.
__________________
"The Parker gun was the first and the greatest ever." Theophilus Nash Buckingham
|
01-08-2020, 10:38 AM
Linear Mode
