PLEASE NOTE THAT APPOINTMENTS ARE NOW REQUIRED IF YOU WISH TO SELL BULK ITEMS TO US.
TO MAKE AN APPOINTMENT, PLEASE RING 07939 999286 OR EMAIL NEWCASTLECOIN@OUTLOOK.COM WITH A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR MATERIAL.
---- WHAT WE OFFER ----
We offer a straightforward in-person valuation service for coins, banknotes, British medals, and any items
made of precious metal (e.g. jewellery, medallions...). We will look at your material and make a no-obligation offer.
We will sometimes also offer to purchase other collectibles (cigarette cards, postcards, tokens...) but we can be selective
with these. We generally pay cash or immediate bank transfer if presented with an official form of ID.
If presented with a quantity of unsorted coins, we will browse the lot and pick out types individually worth about a pound
or more, as well as any silver coins. We will then price the remainder by the kilo (usually 2 to 12 pounds a kilo depending on type).
We can purchase coins and notes which are still exchangeable abroad (e.g. Deutschemarks), even if no longer in use.
We welcome general enquiries and obvious questions (Do you buy x or y...) via email, but will generally not respond to
photograph submissions or long lists of coins submitted for valuation. We enjoy looking at coins and answering common questions
(what's my 50p worth...) in the shop, but don't offer a free internet pricing service as we derive neither pleasure nor income from it.
A lot of our email ends up unread in our spam folder, so ringing is usually the best way to contact us.
The following circulation coins are worth well above their face value at the time of writing (12/2024): Kew Gardens 50p (2009),
Olympics judo/wrestling/triathlon/football 50p, Swimmer 50p with lines through the head (error), and Commonwealth Games 2 pounds.
We generally offer to buy the above. Some others may be worth slightly more than face value, but most of
them can safely be spent. The 50p's and 2 pounds that were not released for general circulation, but were instead only sold to collectors,
are almost always worth more than face value. These coins are almost always found packaged or in albums, and so your chance of finding them in
change is extremely low or virtually non-existent.
As EBay do not charge a listing fee for private sellers, there are plenty of people who list 50p's and other common items there
for 500 or 1000 or 5000 pounds. As everyone wants to know whether the 50p in their pocket is actually worth a fortune, these listings get
looked at over and over and thus move to the top of the Google rankings. So if you search for some common 50p the top listings will probably
tell you that it's worth LOOOOOTS of MOOOONEY. It's not. We are sick and tired of patiently explaining to people that their 50p is worth 50p
when they are adamant that it's worth 500 pounds or whatever. The internet is simply not a reliable source of information about coin prices
unless you know where to look and how to weed out the rubbish.
---- HOW WE COMPARE WITH ALTERNATIVE VENUES ----
PRECIOUS METAL ITEMS:
- There is generally a 10% margin between our buying and selling prices for standard and scrap gold items
(common-dated gold coins, jewellery...), and 20% for silver items such as common circulated silver coins, 1 oz coins,
and crown-size coins. Where items are to be melted down or brokered, our margins can be as low as 2%. Auction houses tend to charge around 20%-40% in fees
(buyers' premium plus sellers' commission). EBay currently have a 4% plus 75p buyer's premium for private sellers,
but many precious-metal listings by private sellers there do badly as not everyone trusts EBay-listed metals to be genuine and as advertised.
Our prices for such items are thus generally very competitive.
ROYAL MINT PROOF AND BU COINS AND SETS, CASED ITEMS FROM RESPECTABLE FOREIGN MINTS...
- We generally have to compete on price with EBay when selling such items, and most of them are not quick-selling, so markups
of 50% or more are typical. Most of them do not sell well in our shop and we have to either wholesale them or sell them online in order to move them on.
They also tend to lose value every year, a bit like a car, and with cashless spreading the future is probably bleak for modern coins - people will not
start collecting 50p's if they don't see 50p's because they don't carry cash! There is thus a significant cost to holding these items for months or years.
You will therefore generally obtain more for correctly-described/graded items of this type if you sell
them yourself on EBay (4% plus 75p buyer's premium for private sellers), should you have the time and inclination to do so.
Auction houses generally end up selling job lots of sets to dealers at poor prices, and can charge around 40% to do so.
-The following is an illustration of why we can't buy such items at high prices:
We sell a proof set on EBay for 50.00
minus: purchase cost at half retail 25.00
VAT on gross profit margin (16.67%) 4.16
Approx postage 5.00
Cumulative EBay Fees circa 7.50
1/2 hr of labour at £20/hr (upload images, write description, post package etc.)10.00
Total profit -1.66
As you can see, we are clearly paying too much if we pay half-price for something that we have to sell online in this price range.
If you would like top prices for your run-of-the-mill base metal cased items, please list them yourself! Just don't expect much of an
hourly wage for doing so.
VALUABLE SINGLE ITEMS, FOR EXAMPLE SILVER COINS BEFORE CIRCA 1880 IN NICE CONDITION
- Early Victorian and Pre-Victorian British coins in average condition sell well to retail customers in the shop,
while the highest quality British and world items benefit from grading and onward sale in international auctions. In particular, coins which would grade
around EF by British grading standards will almost invariably attain AU or MS grades with NGC and PCGS, thereby raising their selling price.
Though we can offer to purchase outright, we are also happy to work with you on a commission basis for quality items, and can get the items
graded and inserted into the international auctions with the most promising track record for any particular type of material.
- The better numismatic auction houses can offer a service similar to that outlined above, including grading, but are unlikely to offer you
dealer terms and may reject or group together any lower-value material. They are also unlikely to provide a local face-to-face service.
While EBay and general auction houses can be good places to sell lower-grade material, authenticity issues tend to work against getting
high prices there for quality material.
JOB LOTS:
- We are experts at breaking down job lots into categories and pricing each category (and better individual coins) separately. Should
you find some coins in a tin or inherit a collection, chances are that you will not know exactly what you've got. This makes it very
difficult for you to correctly describe what you have on EBay, and the postage costs will usually be heavy to boot.
- Auction houses will break down interesting collections into saleable components and may be worth consulting if you have such items. If you've got a
tin of miscellaneous coins, most auction houses will label it a "tin of old coins - worth a look", charge 20%-40% to do so, and let
the dealers in the room put a price on it. We run a bulk coins website and supply dealers with custom ready-made
sets, so we will generally be interested in the low-value coin categories that other dealers reject.
BASE-METAL AND PLATED LONDON MINT OFFICE, DANBURY MINT, WESTMINSTER, KOIN CLUB, BRADFORD EXCHANGE ETC ITEMS
- These companies generally make an attractive introductory offer, and then bombard you with letters and phone calls offering supposedly
rare items at inflated prices. Some of their base metal items (often gold-plated) are medals rather than coins, and these are usually
produced in China at a cost of pence rather than pounds and then sold on for 20 or 30 pounds. The items that are coins generally bear the name
of some tiny territory, such as Tristan da Cunha (TDC) or Alderney, for which the said territory receives a royalty payment from the companies concerned.
Dozens of different so-called rare coins are issued every week. These are technically rare, because they only make 199 of these, 500 of those,
and 50 of the other thing. You could also make 5 "King of North Shields" coins in your garage and they would also be rare, but in all likelihood
no-one would want to buy them!
The second-hand value of the items above is therefore governed by their magpie value, rather than anything to do with rarity or quality.
By magpie value, we mean the value that a passerby might ascribe to a colourful shiny object: "Well that's a big picture of the Queen, I think it's
well worth a fiver", "Oooh look at that dinosaur, my daughter likes dinosaurs and it's only 3 quid", or "I like to collect military stuff that I
don't have. This one has a soldier with poppies. I'll get it for 4 quid."
We'll only purchase these magpie items at rock-bottom prices, so that we can turn a profit by wholesaling most of the stuff to internet or car-boot dealers.
The internet is okay for selling these things, but is time-consuming because they're all different and you have to take a lot of different photos of something
that *might* sell for 3 or 5 or 7 pounds after you've spent half an hour of your life listing it. Car-boot sales, markets and coin fairs are probably
the best places to get shot of these things. General auction houses can be good as well, as long as there are a couple of magpies bidding in the room.
Whatever you do, the prices you will get for this stuff will be a tiny fraction of the prices charged by the companies that initially sold it.
A NOTE ABOUT LOOKING UP PRICES ON EBAY:
Always look up the "completed items" and "sold items" prices (accessible through a "refine" or "advanced search" button on the
search pages), not the asking prices. There is no law against asking silly money for an item, and we have seen sellers asking
a thousand pounds for a Benjamin Britten 50p (our selling price: a pound). Also...
This venue has changed markedly over the past decades, and is no longer primarily a venue for the public to sell their excess
household wares by 'auction'. Most listings on EBay are now fixed-price, with a large proportion of sales being made by either
full-time online retailers or even high street names such as Argos and Cash Generators. These maintain large 'EBay shops' at
significant cost, and their listings are prominently displayed on the site. An individual listing one or two items will
not get the same exposure as these merchants, and will generally have to settle for lower prices as a result.
Moreover, some online salespeople endlessly list and re-list items at stratospheric prices, perhaps in the
hope of a chance sale to some badly-informed buyer, or perhaps to create a phony 'reference price' for some off-
site deal. Whatever the reason, it isn't because you see an item LISTED on EBay for £100 that you
have a realistic chance of SELLING the same item for £100.
---- THE SHOP EXPERIENCE ----
We offer you an experience which is becoming rare these days - a human face behind the counter, happy to discuss coins
and banknotes at length. The shop doubles as an 'office' for our wholesale business, so you can even marvel at the
'organised chaos' in the background.
HOPE TO SEE YOU AROUND!