My 11-year old son has become very interested in football cards. He used to just like finding players on his favorite team (The Tampa Bay Buccaneers- ugh! If it wasn’t going to be the Carolina Panthers, could he not pick a team in another division???), but now he has expanded his interest in what the cards are “potentially” worth.
Now his old man had similar interests in his younger years, except mostly with baseball cards. I’d get the Beckett price guide and add up how much my cards were worth. And, of course, I dreamed of when I was much older and the rookie cards of players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens would be worth millions when they made the Hall of Fame (cough, cough).
My son excitedly pulled me aside one day and showed me a Jayden Daniels (rookie quarterback for the Washington Commanders) card he had just pulled from a new pack. On my wife’s phone, he had found a page that showed that the card’s value was around $1K- wow! Next to the value was an eBay button where one could post it for sale with the push of a button.
Our conversation:
Me: Very cool! Push the button and sell it for a $1K!
Son: Now way, Dad! That’s low. It will be worth much more later.
Me (thinking of the old baseball cards I had in our house with virtually no value): Are you sure? $1K of real money gives you a lot more options.
Son: Nope.
Me: What if Dad sweetens the pot and will give you another $100 on top of the $1K if you can really get close to $1K for it?
He still wasn’t going for it.
In my mind, I wanted to put this estimation of value to the test. Was there really someone willing to pay $1K for this new card? I was doubtful. What was the real market if he was bent on selling it? Ebay, in theory, pulled this valuation from past sales somewhere. I’m thinking that it was worth much less, like single digits. Unfortunately, short of listing his card for sale on the sly, I’ll never know for sure.
I find rental home pricing to be similar. Property managers dig up comparable sales, factor in the differentiating house features, look at the available competition that is renting in the area, and then formulate a price. This price is an educated guess and is compiled in order to get good tenants applying, in a relatively short amount of time, at the highest possible price.
But we don’t really know how many houses are truly on the market for rent. There are many rental websites. Recently, we thought we had priced a home for rent well, only to find that there were almost 10 others on the market in the neighborhood on another website we hadn’t seen- and they were all listed at the price we recommended! That type of similar inventory makes for a logjam.
So what’s the right price? Does it matter how many Jayden Daniels cards are on the market? How can one know how many houses and cards are for sale out there? And how much they sold for?
It does matter, but there is no real way to know everything going on. However, there is a way to know for sure whether a price is good or not. And it’s really simple.
Putting the home on the market for a reasonable amount of time is the surest way to find out. If the house is listed with decent exposure to the market and the valuation is right, it will rent. If Jayden Daniels’s rookie card was listed at $1K and it sold for $1K, the price was right (or too low). If it didn’t sell, the price was probably too high. Simple stuff.
The market sets the price. And the market is constantly changing. But it is pretty efficient. If it didn’t sell, the market declared that the price was too high at that time.
Will my son’s card sell for $1K? There’s only one way to know! I just need to convince him to list it and see.
Happy Landlording!
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