Community LEGO Blogs

Welcome to the fourth installment of a series started by Comicblast called “The Superior Market - eBay vs. BrickLink”. If you haven't read the previous articles, I suggest you start at the beginning and read Comicblast's initial articles here ($0.00 to $9.99) andhere ($10 to $24.99). The third installment can be read here ($25 to $49.99) and gives further background about the purpose of these articles and my approach to continuing the analysis. [divider] Fees for eBay were calculated as follows

Welcome to the third installment of a series started by Comicblast called “The Superior Market - eBay vs. BrickLink”. The purpose of this article is to compare the average sale prices of LEGO sets over the last 6 months. These numbers are the final sale prices, according to data acquired from BrickLink and BrickPicker from August 2013 to January 2014 (yes I realize that the January data isn't 100% complete, but I believe the impact will be minimal). Comicblast's original blog post's can be foun

I tend to focus on bulk. Simple reason really. It's what I spend most of my investment resources on.  While I do have a small and slowly growing pile of boxed sets stashed where the seven year old Sherlock can't find them I will continue to make way more money on bulk lots for the foreseeable future. While there are plenty of exceptions with most sets much of the value is tied to the minifigs. Bulk lots are no different, much of the value in any bulk lot is tied to whatever minifigs it happens

This the eighth entry in a series of blogs that analyses some of the data we have available here on Brickpicker to provide some simple averages to use as benchmarks.  I have done the Star Wars, Ninjago, LOTR/Hobbit, City, Super heroes, Technic, and Friends themes and this time it’s a triple header!  I’m going to put three retired popular movie based themes up at the same time – Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, and Pirates of the Caribbean. My aim is to provide some basic stats for the theme mainly

Hello everybody, Time is money as the old saying goes and that theory applies to Lego investing and reselling. Allow me to introduce myself a little. I'm a critical analyst during work hours, a husband with beautiful kids in the weekend (of course) and ... English is my third language, so apologies for my grammar.  Lego was (and is again) one of my biggest passions as I picked it back up in 2012 after the traditional "Dark Age" which lasted more than a decade I'm not proud to admit. I've been

Many of us grew up on LEGO City sets.  With each passing year, LEGO seems to produce a new Fire or Police Station, yet many of these sets still appreciate very well in the LEGO secondary market.  Let's take a look at some City sets that might do well in 2014... First, and in all fairness, I have to tell you I'm Canadian - BUT - that when I head to the US I drive north.  Yes, I live in Windsor, Ontario,  Stephen Colbert's least favorite city on the map.  Being Canadian means that a few sets on t

This the seventh entry in a series of blogs that analyses some of the data we have available here on Brickpicker to provide some simple averages to use as benchmarks.  I have done the Star Wars, Ninjago, LOTR/Hobbit, City, Super heroes, and Technic themes and this time it’s the turn of Friends! My aim is to provide some basic stats for the theme mainly around averages for a few simple measures relating to set sizes and value for money metrics.  I’m going to leave out investment return measures

So its no secret that the 9468 Vampyre Castle has a big following on this site and a lot of people have stashed them away hoping for the killer gains that all the awesome Lego castle's seem to bring. Around November, we were all finishing buying out Toys R Us, the Lego Shops near us (on clearance), and Amazon while salivating over what was to come. Suddenly, Toys R Us orders somewhere near a million for each store to restock for a huge sale. The Vampyre Castle (9468) then showed up on ToysRUs.co

Look at her, isn’t she a marvel! I stumbled upon this set looking back over a few of the older sets in the City theme.  It caught my eye as something I would have loved to have played with when I was a kid, so much play opportunity for a young lad.  Then after looking at sets info page here on Brickpicker the CAGR and secondary market pricing history captured my attention. The first thing is that the set boasts a very impressive CAGR of 22.6%, that puts it ahead of all but one of the entire

[box type="info" ]This blog follows on from my previous blogs (May, July, September, and October) presenting the top 20 sets in terms of secondary market price growth according to the data we have available here on Brickpicker.[/box] Again, here are some notes on the scope before I begin: I have not restricted the qualifying sets by size or age or any other dimension Information is based on US prices only Not all sets across all themes are included as I have zero interest in Bionicle/Hero Fa

There are a lot of great reasons to get into polybags; sometimes they show up in your Lego orders for free or after buying enough product, sometimes you see a nice box of them in a store with a sale or clearance price tag and wonder if there is any value there.  Sometimes you see them being discussed on Brickpicker or another Lego forum and simply decide you *must* obtain a certain polybag because it is pretty darn cool or fits perfectly into your Lego MOC.  Whatever your reason, I'd like to out

The success of the modular line in the Lego Investing culture is obvious. Market Street, The Green Grocer, and Cafe Corner all have seen and continued to see insanely successful growth rates, with the newer Modulars only boosting their appeal to people. Take a look at the CAGRs of the different sets below: Set NameRetail PriceCurrent Price (new)CAGRMarket Street 10190$89.99$1472.6759.34%Cafe Corner 10182$139.99$1426.2747.24%Green Grocer 10185$149.99$760.7438.37%So naturally, the Fire Brigade, as

"Ed"itor's Note:  Over the past three plus years, I have encountered many types of people on our site and other LEGO sites.  One common thread that connects many LEGO fans is that many are highly educated.  There are many programmers, stock brokers, doctors, accountants, chemists, engineers and business owners that inhabit the various LEGO forums.  DoNotInsertInMouth is one such person...or character.  To make a long story short, I almost banned him for his name and wacko avatar he originally us

Collectible Minifigures (CMFs) – they have a lot to answer for, don’t they? I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been drawn back into the grips of TLG by these ‘cheap’ Lego sets? ‘Cheap’ in inverted commas because you never buy one, do you? Every man has a part of his brain dedicated to hoarding and collecting and ‘having the full set’ – every kid does too. CMFs are the work of some scheming genius. The Guardian printed an article in 2011 on the success and effect of the CMF series: “Lego sai

While lurking in the shadows of this site I've read many differing takes on the ins and outs of investing in LEGO. The majority of those opinions center arround either long term investing or short term flipping and which sets are best suited for either. While those are both worthy endevours and I would not discourage anyone from either pursuit one angle of investing seems to be overlooked in most of the posts that I have seen. The missing strategy is buying LEGO in bulk. Where to get it, what to

For those of you who read my post about ebay powerselling (from what feels like 10 years ago) you'll note I had grand ambitions to become a powerseller by this Christmas season to reduce the cut ebay takes from each sale.  I planned on adding more polybags, smaller sets and the like to boost my total sales numbers.  I didn't have enough complete sets that were retired or purchased sufficiently below retail (Canadian retail) to move, so I was hoping to go smaller and faster, Ninjago-like, if you

Welcome to the second installment of a series of articles I am putting together called “The Superior Market - eBay vs. BrickLink”. The purpose of this type of article is to compare the average sale prices of LEGO sets over the last 5 months. These numbers are the final sale prices, according to data acquired from BrickLink and BrickPicker. Some readers were a little confused on the purpose of the first article, which you can read at: http://www.brickpicker.com/forum/index.php/blog/15/entry-430-

Alright, so most of you probably saw my first blog on becoming a power seller, Buyer Discussion (you may not have read it because of its length, ha!) but I needed to do the same for sellers, so this is it. I do want to let people know I am going to do quite a few Ebay blogs about being a power seller, owning an Ebay store, the toils of making this a business, and even more on it. On to the discussion though, this article is about how those of us who have become bigger sellers, selling several i

Central Europe Investors: protect your investment and satisfy your desire to build your LEGO sets. One of the easiest ways to burn the money you invested in LEGO is to open a MISB set, just because you always wanted to build that special model. You will decrease the value faster than you can change your brickfolio entry from “new” to “used.” Unless you have a good friend who lets you build his already opened 10179 Millenium Falcon, you have to sit in front of your MISB set and continue drooling

So, anyone who has read the articles in my blog space here, listened to my comments on the forums, or seen my rantings about it in my created topics knows that I spend an insane amount of time on Ebay. Seriously the equivalent of a solid 2-3 hours a day. I love to shop (but not physically) and I really love to find deals. Most of the time I don't care if I actually want it - I like to find those "diamonds in the rough", etc. My views and opinions on Ebay have changed quite a bit in just a short

I wanted to start a dialogue about what I think many people are missing when they discuss any myriad of topics on this and other sites and that is the view of our ‘business’ from a distance, the big picture if you will. I'm not talking about a bubble bursting or not bursting conversation, but instead the changes in the Lego culture that have manifested over the past few years. I will start out by stating that I don't have all the answers, none of us do; but I think we need to start talking about

Out of curiosity, I started taking a look at TLG's annual financial reports available since 1999, and thought it would be interesting to show some graphs with the evolution of the company since then. This is not meant to be an in depth analysis, but rather a very visual and quick way of examining how these little bricks that occupy so much of our time have performed over the past decade (more than 12 years actually). I might get into more detail in further posts of whatever I find and consider

After a 2 month hiatus, it's time to see the current trends as far as best selling LEGO sets is concerned, based on eBay licensed information. This time, I will only include comments on those sets that are new to the list or that have experimented an special "event", as I can't really add too much information to, say, the 7965 MF's every single month. Let's get to it! September 2013 Top Ten 1 421 Sold (New) I don't really think anyone will be surprised to see this set in the top spot of th

In this second entry on the Minifig Corner, I wanted to focus on one of the most sought after and expensive minifigs ever released: The Cloud City variation of Boba Fett. First of all, it seems logical that a minifigure of this particular character is one of the most popular released by LEGO, given the high popularity of the character it is based on. For some reason that's completely beyond me, Boba Fett has been one of the most admired characters of the whole Star Wars series, even though he di

Last February I did a blog on the Bottom 50 LEGO sets with regards to CAGR values. Among the Bottom 50 LEGO sets, there were 5 Toy Story sets: 7591 Construct-A-Zurg 7598 Pizza Planet Truck Rescue 7789 Lotso's Dump Truck 7596 Trash Compactor Escape 7593 Buzz's Command Spaceship Not only did the Toy Story theme make up 10% of the Bottom 50 LEGO sets, the worst performing set was a Toy Story set...the 7591 Construct-A-Zurg. Well, I took a look at the most recent BrickIndex, which shows the top appr