Prospecting Mistake #2: Never, Ever, Ever Let A Couple Dollars Kill A Deal
I feel like this is important because a lot of people fail to realize you’re dealing with people that believe they’re kings of the goddamn earth. They’re incredibly greedy 20-year olds that think they’re the prospecting gods of the universe.
From either side of the deal, they’ll try and stick it to you. There are some completely reasonable people out there, but they’re few and far between.
They will try and nickel and dime you, and they will go almost perfectly with the ebb and flow of the prospect market.
If a prospect card sells for $17, $20, $14, and $19, you won’t be paying the average of the sales. The seller will almost certainly want either $19 or $20.
While you should try and offer him a fair price and get him to come down, it’s often not worth your time or effort. You just have to remember that you’re not buying a $20 card to sell it for $25 (or so I’d hope). You’re buying a $20 card to sell for $40 or $60 because you genuinely believe in the prospect.
You should definitely keep track of eBay to know what’s going on, but it’s not the final word. Obviously, if you can get the card somewhere else for cheaper, go ahead and do it, but the point is to get the card of the guy that you think is undervalued.
The number of kids that honestly believed that they could do $21 but not $23 on a Mike Trout Bowman Chrome was astonishing. They tied their hands because they refused to pay a dollar or two more than the last completed sale! They may have grabbed a card or two on eBay, but they also lost out on the chance to own that particular card.
Does it really matter on an $80 card if you paid $21 or $23?
People have become so concerned with the going rate on eBay that they’ve lost track of what they’re trying to accomplish. These are the people that dig around messageboards and look for guys that everyone else is buying so that they can have a stash too and even if a card is drastically undervalued, they’ll refuse to pay anything above market value because they assume they can get the card elsewhere.
Guess what? Very rarely do they get the card elsewhere at the price they wanted.
