I know many people who have found amazing things on facebook marketplace. It is said that “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” after all. Facebook Marketplace is a great place to find incredible things at a reasonable price. My husband and our oldest son had an amazing find earlier this year, and I asked him to share it with you in the post below. Enjoy reading about their experience!
It was March 11, 2024, at 8am, and I was at home getting ready for work. The all-knowing Facebook algorithm populated my feed with new marketplace postings for the day, and one caught my eye. “Various sports cards.”
I had only heard about those rare garage sale finds where a keen shopper finds a hidden gem and buys it for a fraction of what it’s worth. But “various sports cards” definitely didn’t scream that to me, so I just perused the listing and photos, and realized quickly this person didn’t take the time to take good photos. So I simply sent a quick question, “what years are the basketball cards from,” hoping that she would say anything but 1990-94, the years of overproduced “junk wax.” I had little hope that it was non-junk wax era.
“1980 to present” was her answer. At that point, I knew there were too many boxes of too many years of too many “various” cards for me to be able to value based on such generic information, so I let it go and went to work. I got going with the usual Monday morning meeting, but something wasn’t sitting right about leaving this “stone” unturned. After the first meeting, I sent another message clarifying what I noticed in one of the listing’s photos. “Are they in top loader cases?” The seller quickly responded with another photo zooming in on a few of the top-loaded cards, with baseball cards from the mid-late 90s including some autos, refractors, and big names like Ken Griffey Jr. and Frank Thomas, my favorite player as a kid. All of a sudden my interest went from “meh” to “okay, tell me more!”
Before I could take a break and respond with another question, the seller made an offer to me that shocked me. Typically in a facebook marketplace conversation, an inquiry into a listing doesn’t lead to such a bold offer after such few words exchanged. So, I was skeptical that this offer was either A) too good to be true with intent to scam or B) a hoard of junk wax era cards worth no more than a few pennies per card. The offer was worded “$500 for the whole lot. That includes the all the sports though. My dad was a collector of cards for over 65 years. He passed away and mom needs them gone.”
“Wow! That’s quite an offer!” I said. She replied, explaining how tired she was of trying to sell all of her dad’s collections, that she wanted them gone today. I was at a crossroads. I knew I had another meeting scheduled for 11:30, but here was this offer from a lady just down the road that had such urgency, and it was only 11:00 am. Knowing that my job comes first, I stalled the seller in hopes that she would wait for me “I need to look at them before considering such a purchase, I can come this afternoon.”
She agreed to set up a time for me to look later, and I waited for my 11:30 to arrive. 11:31 hit and the other party in my meeting texts that she going to be much later and needs to push it to the afternoon. YES, now I get to check out these cards! I got the address, and told the wife I wasn’t going home for lunch. She agreed and suggested I take my oldest son, also an avid card-collector, along with me. Chance would have it that they were driving by my place of work at that exact moment.
So together we went to a home over on the nicer side of town. I warned my son, “now if we get there and it’s clearly a waste of our time, just follow my lead and I’ll say no thank you. But, by slim chance, if the cards are clearly valuable, then we can signal to each other and I’ll decide if it’s worth the $500 she’s asking.”
So we get there and sure enough, everything she’s said up to this point totally checks out. The “various cards” really were widely varied well beyond the classic early 90’s baseball set we’ve seen before. This collection was boxes upon boxes of all the major sports, as well as some “random” boxes of cards and memorabilia. It included baseball, basketball, football, hockey, golf, nascar, Olympics, presidential, Star Wars, and even some celebrity cards.
Knowing football and basketball better than anything, we went straight for the those two sports-labeled boxes. It wasn’t 5 minutes of perusing these cards that we realized that this sample of cards we’d started with was well preserved and filled with mostly the big names from each sport during 1996-2003. This guy knew his cards.
It is widely known that the late 90’s to early 2000’s was the era of some of the most beautiful and most-beloved cards ever made. Topps Chrome, Skybox, Fleer, Upper Deck, Topps Finest, Bowman Chrome, Donruss Elite, Flair, and Leaf are the brands I’m talking about. NBA players like, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Shaq, Tim Duncan, Dirk Nowitzki, many of them from their rookie years, NFL players like Tom Brady, Emmitt Smith, Troy Polumalu, LaDanian Tomlinson, Randy Moss from their rookie years… these boxes were full of them.
We had no idea what they were worth based on just glancing at them, but we knew it was going to be worth the trouble of researching them and trying to resell them. It was then that I offered to split everything 50/50 with my son. He happened to have $250 in his account so we split the purchase and agreed to co-own every card and split any amount made from selling them. We knew this deal was going to benefit all parties. It was clear that this sweet woman and her mother were distraught with their deceased father/husband’s card collection and just wanted them out of the house. It was a perfect match, because we were just beginning spring break and had plenty of time to pick up a new project. So we shook on it. We gave her the full asking price of $500 and my son and I loaded the boxes in my truck after thanking these ladies and reassuring them that we would enjoy and respect the collection. You could see the burden lift off their faces like a ton of bricks taken off of their shoulders. It was such a blessing to be able to help them while getting such a treasure. And a treasure it was.
It wasn’t long until we realized that many of these cards were from a series of prints (some of them very low numbered) of others listed on eBay, and many of these “comps” or comparatives were sold anywhere from $10-$100 each. And there were thousands of cards. Granted, most of the cards were sold closer to $10 than they were to $100, but it was still by far more valuable than all of our cards we had collected.
So for the next few days, my son went to work inspecting each card and looking up comps for each one for hours and hours, placing a sticker and a price on each one. He already had experienced selling some of his own collection on my wife’s eBay account so he asked if she would let him post our best ones for sale.
Occasionally he would yell “Dad!” and run into my room with a card that had a comp of over $200 and we’d post it as an eBay auction. And on quite a few occasions, he wasn’t able to find a comp on a card. We were not sure what that meant so we’d put them up for auction, too. We found out that eBay only shares “sold” history that goes back 6 months so we’d check other websites like 130 Point.
We started cataloguing our new collection using an app called Ludex. It was a full-time job for my son during spring break, and what a fun job it turned out to be. My wife graciously gave our son access to her eBay account to post many of these cards for sale and even agreed to ship all the cards we have sold. I am not sure she knew was what she was agreeing to at the time but we are so thankful she did. We have sold over 400 of those cards in the last 6 months, many of them for over $50 a piece. As you can imagine, it wasn’t long before we made our money back, and starting turning a good profit.
Granted, it has come with its challenges of storing the cards, sorting them, researching and listing them, then finding them once they have sold. Then there’s shipping. We have shipped all over the world, and for those high dollar cards you have to pay quite a bit to insure them just in case. A piece of cardboard…can you imagine paying $25 to insure a piece of cardboard? Thankfully we have had only one claim with USPS due to it getting damaged in shipping, but they were quick to refund us. We have a 100% positive feedback rating on eBay, earning “top seller” status. Check out our eBay store still with over 400 listings at account: gena00. (She also sells plants and other things if you are not into sports cards.)
It’s been 6 months since we discovered and purchased the man’s treasure and we have sold off our best cards we have found. And now we have gotten into grading many of these cards so we can preserve them even better. We have started going to card shows and even invited some card collectors over to our house.
The sports card industry is alive and well and this hobby has really dominated much of our family conversations since March. I would not trade it for the world. We have learned to work together and barter and negotiate a sale, both online and in person. We have learned to trust each other with money, business practices, and hardest of all, knowing what to sell and when. It’s a tough market, sports cards, but we have learned a lot and had a blast taking our whole family along for the ride!
Check out this sports gifts for kids and teens guide!
