Are pickelhaube prices collapsing?

Maple Creek

Maple Creek

Member
I haven't been tracking value very closely, but today looked closely at the realized prices from Jan Kube's 24 September 2016 Special Auction. I was alarmed at the low hammer prices for some items. I did a little analysis comparing the estimated values for some items in our family collection and the prices from this recent auction. You can see the results below. The estimates are my own developed for insurance purposes. They are mostly based on Jim Turinetti's 2010 Pricing Guide. For my purposes I generally took low end values from Jim's book and further discounted by 30% to allow for current market conditions. For the realized prices I added Kube's 23% auction fee and converted to dollars at the rate prevailing at the time of the auction. For some things my estimates were way under, for others way over. On average my estimates were only $500 less than realized prices, but variations were great.

I was particularly surprised by the low prices for the Mecklenburg officers kuglehelm ($967) (compared to my estimated value for our officer's pickelhaube), and the Oldenburg officers dragoon helmet ($1,244). I put the officers' Garde du Korps helmet on the list using the reserve price of $10K although this failed to sell.

What are other people's impressions of the current market values and where do you think the market is going?

Mark D.
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http://i1008.photobucket.com/albums/af204/maple_creek/Price Analysis - Kube 9_24_16_zpslyvdj7zw.jpg
 
Hello Mark,

May I suggest that you watch prices on reputable auction houses that sell original Pickelhauben that haven't been screwed around with? I wouldn't buy a brass spike base brad from Kube because chances are high it's been screwed with.
 
Hi Tony, Thanks for this advice. Could be that some of the lower priced items were put together pieces or otherwise flawed. It's hard to tell from a single photo of the item or from the description, which in any case I don't fully grasp not being fluent in German.

I do think prices are down, though.

Cheers,
Mark D.

Tony without Kaiser said:
Hello Mark,

May I suggest that you watch prices on reputable auction houses that sell original Pickelhauben that haven't been screwed around with? I wouldn't buy a brass spike base brad from Kube because chances are high it's been screwed with.
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I think the common stuff may be down a little, and very little, but everything I want is still expensive, IMO

James
 
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