MrFahrenheit
Well-known member
In my locale, an elderly man was a vintage Apple collector/hoarder. He passed away, and the person he willed his estate to is selling it. However, she's also being very difficult to deal with.
My friend called me to the 'garage sale' that had Vintage Apple's because he purchased some LC5xx Macs for $20 each. He then told me there was everything, you name it, it's there. I dropped what I was doing and drove across town to see it.
When I got there, sure enough, 150+ Macs on shelves. Everything. 128k all the way up to PowerMac 9600 and G3s, G4, G5 iMacs. Every single model of PowerBook. Many multiples of some. Printers, monitors. It was all there.
I asked about a few items, and I was presented with prices significantly higher than my friend paid. Example, a Mac LCIII, untested, bare, $200. They wouldn't budge with pricing.
I was able to get her to email me the list of the items, but she refused to give me the prices. They didn't want someone 'cherry picking' the lot. ...okay... ?
I asked about 25 items, and her response was maybe I'd like to just buy the whole thing. It hadn't really occurred to me. So I think about it, and I ask her what she wanted for the lot. She tells me a man had shown up on Saturday morning with $10k in cash and she was insulted with the amount and told him to f-off. ...okay... ?
So I go through the items, and basically it's a $30k blow-out on eBay, providing each 'box' has guts inside. It's a huge gamble. She makes the first move and says she wants $15k. I counter with less than that and she says there's gold here. Like, literal gold. She is convinced that someone could extract all of the gold from the machines and be $50k+ ahead. ...okay... ?
Then I tell her the boards are actually made of copper, not gold. Components are soldered with lead solder, not gold. etc. She's not convinced. Then she says broken computers are worth far more than working ones, because the parts inside are worth more than an entire computer. Obviously she's browsing eBay, and seeing disk drives sell for $50 when the computer sells for $30, etc. I tell her that's not the way it works. She isn't convinced yet again. Then she tells me that people take these same computers and turn them into an iPad holder and sell them for $2200. Sorry, I'm not convinced.
Then she tells me any one of these machines could be cleaned up and fixed up and sold for over $3000 each, and there's a 'goldmine' here... (remember, these are everything, IIci, IIvx, LCs, SEs, Classics, but all of the 'unicorns' have already been picked out by a couple of local collectors for peanuts [she sold them to them as 'monitors']).
How in the world do you talk straight into someone like this without losing your cool and without losing the deal. Because I think in the end, she's going to discover it's not what she thinks, and either she's going to destroy them all 'looking for gold' or blowing them out to someone else for pennies on the dollar, or keeping them until they're wrecked from weather (they're currently being stored in a non-climate-controlled garage, with 90%+ humidity, 100' temperatures during the day, and 50' temps at night. If she doesn't sell them before November, they'll also be in temps of -40'.
I've given an offer that I placed an expiration time on, but it's a huge gamble. Anyone else encounter someone like this ?
My friend called me to the 'garage sale' that had Vintage Apple's because he purchased some LC5xx Macs for $20 each. He then told me there was everything, you name it, it's there. I dropped what I was doing and drove across town to see it.
When I got there, sure enough, 150+ Macs on shelves. Everything. 128k all the way up to PowerMac 9600 and G3s, G4, G5 iMacs. Every single model of PowerBook. Many multiples of some. Printers, monitors. It was all there.
I asked about a few items, and I was presented with prices significantly higher than my friend paid. Example, a Mac LCIII, untested, bare, $200. They wouldn't budge with pricing.
I was able to get her to email me the list of the items, but she refused to give me the prices. They didn't want someone 'cherry picking' the lot. ...okay... ?
I asked about 25 items, and her response was maybe I'd like to just buy the whole thing. It hadn't really occurred to me. So I think about it, and I ask her what she wanted for the lot. She tells me a man had shown up on Saturday morning with $10k in cash and she was insulted with the amount and told him to f-off. ...okay... ?
So I go through the items, and basically it's a $30k blow-out on eBay, providing each 'box' has guts inside. It's a huge gamble. She makes the first move and says she wants $15k. I counter with less than that and she says there's gold here. Like, literal gold. She is convinced that someone could extract all of the gold from the machines and be $50k+ ahead. ...okay... ?
Then I tell her the boards are actually made of copper, not gold. Components are soldered with lead solder, not gold. etc. She's not convinced. Then she says broken computers are worth far more than working ones, because the parts inside are worth more than an entire computer. Obviously she's browsing eBay, and seeing disk drives sell for $50 when the computer sells for $30, etc. I tell her that's not the way it works. She isn't convinced yet again. Then she tells me that people take these same computers and turn them into an iPad holder and sell them for $2200. Sorry, I'm not convinced.
Then she tells me any one of these machines could be cleaned up and fixed up and sold for over $3000 each, and there's a 'goldmine' here... (remember, these are everything, IIci, IIvx, LCs, SEs, Classics, but all of the 'unicorns' have already been picked out by a couple of local collectors for peanuts [she sold them to them as 'monitors']).
How in the world do you talk straight into someone like this without losing your cool and without losing the deal. Because I think in the end, she's going to discover it's not what she thinks, and either she's going to destroy them all 'looking for gold' or blowing them out to someone else for pennies on the dollar, or keeping them until they're wrecked from weather (they're currently being stored in a non-climate-controlled garage, with 90%+ humidity, 100' temperatures during the day, and 50' temps at night. If she doesn't sell them before November, they'll also be in temps of -40'.
I've given an offer that I placed an expiration time on, but it's a huge gamble. Anyone else encounter someone like this ?