Community LEGO Blogs

As I have been opening sets lately to build them and increase my display, I have come across a problem: What do I do with the boxes to my used sets? It takes up room to keep them, but I am afraid if I ever decide to sell one of my display sets, I will be disappointed with how much money I lose for not having the box. I decided I had to find out because I am quickly running out of room in my downstairs closet for all my open boxes. This was a very difficult venture with a ton of information. Unfo

Most people can figure out the bidding function on Ebay with ease. Proxy bidding is a very simple concept to understand: If you bid higher than the current bidder, the price only goes up to just above their bid. Once the auction ends, the highest bidder wins. If you bid a max higher than what the auction ends at, you only have to pay the current bid, not your max. Most people take this general simplicity, along with the fact that the highest bid wins, and think they don't need a strategy. Howeve

I have been on Ebay since the late 90's. Back then, I was a very early teen and I grew up watching my Dad use Ebay to buy old toy Train sets as he was a giant train enthusiast. He and I loved Ebay because you could get online and see thousands of items from thousands of buyers and had choices to buy used or buy new and be able to get a possible discount off a store price. My Dad once commented "The bad thing about Ebay is you can't haggle. Haggling is the only way to get the best price". Obvious

There are many people who have invested, are investing, and will invest in various markets, like the stock market. There is a wide variety of what you can invest in, and there is a lot of people to invest in them. Alas, the Lego collecting market is a lot smaller. Not that many people see that Legos can be used as an investment. They just see it as a great toy for children to play with. But, there is a few people who see that you can make a buck or two investing in Legos. The stock market is con

The 10215 Obi-Wan's Jedi Starfighter is the latest UCS set to be retired. Saying this the value of the set should increase soon, as almost all UCS sets do. This UCS set is one of the smaller sets. The set only has 676 pieces. This makes it the second smallest UCS set. The smallest is the Special Edition Naboo Starfighter with only 187 pieces. The set has no minifigures, like many other UCS sets, but the set does have a larger astromech head. Usually, UCS sets do really well in the secondary mark

In the first part of this blog, I gave a lot of reason's why Best Offer can be a great thing for buyers purchasing sets on Ebay. However, it is also a great tool for a seller as well. Auctions are definitely a really good way to sell items, but if you want to go with Buy It Now for any reason ( and there are advantages to Buy it Now), I recommend using Best Offer as well. A lot of seller's avoid Best Offer for many reasons: They don't want to deal with low-ball offers. The don't want to spend th

One day, while searching on eBay, I decided to have a little bit of fun and search the term “LEGO” and sort by Highest Price + Shipping. What I came across was mind blowing! The most interesting listing I came across was about a person selling their whole store, for about $30,000 including the stock of LEGO’s that they had. Now I wondered, was there a key to buying in bulk? Did you buy small lots, then sort them by color then send them off to some other person who would have to sort through them

There has been a lot of talk in the forums about the Lord of The Rings LEGO theme over the past few months, most of it enthusiastic and positive, but also with some doubters and skeptics. My intent with writing this article is to get a little deeper into the future prospects of this line of sets in the secondary market, and for that I will be making use of another theme that has been recently retired to get a more accurate prediction about what should we expect with the LOTR, and that is Harry P

Now that Quacs has dissected the real value and investment viability of this lot when it comes to complete sets, I wanted to give you all some perspective and information about a very different way to consider the potential of the lot: Parting out the whole lot. When you start to think about just how many parts are included in this lot, it becomes quickly apparent that there is a lot of upside to opening every single set and selling each brick on a Bricklink store. But let's evaluate this thoug

This entry of our regular BrickIndex spotlight features a set that some of you may be surprised to find in the list at this point: the 10189 Taj Mahal. The largest set (by piece count) that LEGO has ever produced has been retired for around three full years and has a current market value of almost $ 1,600 according to last month's data. It is quite amazing that an incredibly expensive set like this finds a place in the Top 20 (#19) fastest growing sets of the past 6 months, but with a growth of

Thanks to those of you who have been reading this series of the LEGO Star Wars BrickIndex Top 20 Performers! If you are just picking up here, here's a small introduction to what I have been writing about. One of the helpful features of BrickPicker is that it provides the values of LEGO sets from various themes throughout the LEGO world. Another is that BrickPicker does a basic analysis of sets from a certain theme, and finds the Top 20 Performers of that theme, or of all themes. One theme that

I know I've seen a few people say a few things about sourcing shipping boxes so I wanted to share that you can get free USPS priority boxes at your Post Office or online. Flat rate boxes are going to be good for really heavy lots (probably over 6-7lb or more) and all the boxes with an "O" in the title followed by a code are just general use Priority boxes. I just found boxes that will fit the Orc Forges I bought allowing for a layer of bubble wrap to go around. Just be aware that, though these b

Investing, trading, speculating, flipping, gambling, hoarding, whichever “-ing” you decide to label a particular strategy with they all boil down to one thing – making money (well maybe not hoarding!). The handle you attach doesn’t really matter, we don’t need a label to neatly categorize different strategies into compartmentalised silos. Personally I use investing or investment as a catch-all term to encompass any form of buying an asset (Lego in this case) for the intention of resale at a prof

This is the first of 4 installments comparing and contrasting sets from the Star Wars Universe from the BrickIndex Top 20 list. 1. 10174-1: Imperial AT-ST 2. 10212-1: Imperial Shuttle 3. 10186-1: General Grievous 4. 10143-1: Death Star II 5. 7255-1: General Grievous Chase As promised, I am now going to write short paragraphs on the TOP 20 Performing Star Wars sets, in sets of 5.     **Please Note: These percentages are for the month of April. The BrickIndex has not yet been updated to Ma

May 4th is widely known as Star Wars day. On May 4th and 5th, 2013 there was a sale on Lego Star Wars sets in Lego stores and on Lego Shop online. Most of the Star Wars sets were 10% of. But there was one set that has 50% off. That set is the 10227 B-Wing Starfighter. Since the set was 50% off, many people bought the set online and in Lego stores across the country and world. This has a bad effect on the future value of the set. I heard that many people were buying the set so they could resell i

The UCS R2-D2 is one of my favorite sets of all time that I have built. I got this set in April of 2013 and as soon as I came home from the store, I started building it. It was a fun build, but what really suprised me is that there was a variety of colors in the set. It is just not the blue, white, and gray you see on the outside of the set. on the inside there is a vaiety of colors such as yellow, green, and blue. For investing, the set is an UCS set. Usually these sets do well in the secondary

So, let's take a little further look into the numbers behind the Houston lot. First, I broke down the lot into retired vs. active sets, and small, medium and large sets. For each of these groups, I calculated the % of sets by quantity and % by current BP dollar value. Here are the raw numbers for each category: Retired vs. Active Sets Total sets: 282 Total BP value: $17,043 Total retired sets: 98 (35%) Total active sets: 184 (65%) BP value of retired sets: $3,840 (23%) BP value of active set

Another short blog post here. After seeing the incredibly large, unused Lego collection posted by JoshTX earlier in the day, I thought I would try to calculate the MSRP and current Brickpicker value to see how good of a deal this actually is. Let me preface this by saying I hope nothing bad has happened that would force the owner of this portfolio to sell this great collection. I would never wish ill upon a fellow Brickpicker. Here are the values I came up with: Total MSRP on all sets: $18,74

Well known towers, skyscrapers, residences, hotels and other famous landmarks. What do all these structures have in common? well, they all form part of their own dedicated LEGO theme: Architecture. A theme with origins going back to the 1960s, that was brought back to life by LEGO at some point in 2008 with the introduction of their very first mini model of a "real world" landmark, the Sears Tower (To be changed not much later to the Willis Tower). For those of you out there that enjoy architec

I recently went to an unofficial LEGO convention called World War Brick 2013. It took place at the Brickmania headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota on June 28th-30th. They had a whole slew of military related displays that were either built by Brickmania, the Twin Cities LEGO Train Club, the Greater Midwest Lego® Train Club, and the weekend pass holders who brought their own personal displays. They had three groups of people. Staff. Those people were vendors who were selling items or were e

Tommorow, I will be headed off to the beautiful land of Asia with my family (visiting some relatives). It will be my first time headed to Asia, and I thought I could take advantage of the trip to give Brickpickers an inside look at one of TLG's emerging markets. As some of you may or may not know, Lego said in a recent press release that it is planning to build a factory in Jiaxing, China, to support the Asian market, which saw sales in recent years grow by around 50% annually. The factory will

Just a quick blog entry today. This morning there was a post in the forum discussing this, but since I already wrote the blog entry last night, I figured I would release it anyway... For all you Star Wars enthusiasts, check out this website that chronicles one man's journey to build a UCS AT-AT that is minifigure scale: http://gimmelego.blogspot.com/2013/07/ucs-at-at-they-think-its-all-over.html Here's a picture of this behemoth! Some stats on this MOC: Piece count - approximately 6,250 Pie

When choosing between the Clone Wars, the Prequel Trilogy, and the Original Trilogy, most LEGO investors turn to the Original Trilogy, because of its superior storyline, and overall quality. In second place usually comes the Prequel Trilogy, with its somewhat muddy storyline, but still above average quality, in my opinion. Finally dead last, comes the Clone Wars. Though it is difficult to compare an animated TV show with a full-blown movie, it is clear that it is the lackluster of the three. Doe

This new blog category will be the place where I post about those CUUSOO projects that I personally like the most. I know that there is a specific thread like this already in the forums, and TOK does a great job summarizing some of the best ideas, but I wanted to make this a more personal and regular type of thing. With the new blog system, I think it is the best place to do it! The Legend of Zelda is my all time favorite video game series, so it made sense for me to pick the CUUSOO project sch

As many of you know, I have been a LEGO Star Wars believer, through and through. Though I have added on some new beliefs such as SpongeBob and Hero Factory, I never was convinced by the Lord of the Rings LEGO theme. Sure, I did realize that there would be some winners such as the Battle of Helm's Deep or Orc Forge, but this was partially because this was the common concensus with other investors. To further explain why, let's bring you back a couple of years. My older brother and I had just wal