Benchmarks: LEGO City

This is the Fourth 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, and LOTR/Hobbit themes and this time it’s the turn of the City theme. The City theme is one of Lego’s ‘evergreen’ themes, meaning it is never retired and there are always new sets in the theme available. The current iteration of the City theme began in 2005 and took over from the World City theme. It’s this current City line from 2005 onwards that I’ll be looking at.

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 such as CAGR and the various ROI time periods we have available as I think they should be a different discussion and the fact that current retail sets often muddy the results when looking at theme wide averages.

This information should prove useful in writing other blog articles or set reviews. It also should serve as a benchmark to be able to compare a set against the averages for its theme, which may or may not be useful but the option is there. Over time as I hope to complete more of these blog posts we might also be able to compare themes against each other.

Basic Information

For the City theme I gathered data on 180 sets from Brickpicker set pages. I’m only going to look at US based information in regards to retail price etc.

For the City theme I have split the analysis into subthemes, pulling out the major ones and grouping the rest into an Other category. This may help us see if there are any differences between the subthemes and could be useful if you want to compare a one particular set to the averages within each specific subtheme. Totals will give us the overall results for the whole City theme.

I can also tell you that of the 180 sets 10 of them had no listed retail price. So they need to be excluded from some of the later measures that require a retail price to be present.

Pieces

The average piece count per set is 271 pieces. When split by subtheme there is a bit of a difference with the 13 trains sets having the highest average at 471 and the 18 accessory grouped sets the lowest average of 136 pieces.

Retail Price

The 170 sets have an overall average of $34.25 for retail price. As you would expect the larger sets in the trains subtheme push it well above the rest to have the highest retail price average.

Price Per Piece (PPP)

Whether you like using PPP as a measure of value for money or not I have included it here as it has become quite a common metric for people to use. Personally I don’t put much stock in it and find it quite a blunt tool.

As mentioned there were 10 sets without a retail price that need to be excluded here, but I’ve also excluded 5 other sets that I deemed as outliers. These were set like baseplates that have a high price for essentially 1 piece and they distort the averages too much.

The overall average for the 165 sets is $0.141 per piece. That seems a lot higher when compared to the conventional benchmark of $0.10 per piece. There are no license fees to be paid in this theme and it uses plenty of normal conventional pieces so you would expect the PPP average to be lower.

The train sets definitely push the averages up a little but I’m surprised to see the other sets all relatively high as well.

Price Per Gram (PPG)

PPG is in my opinion a better indicator of retail value for money. It takes into account the amount of raw ABS plastic material you get in the box and should be a closer approximation to the cost of production of the set.

Again removing the 10 sets without a retail price there is also 2 more sets removed as I couldn’t find a weight for them. So for the 168 sets the overall average PPG is $0.062.

Minifigure Count

Of the 180 sets 171 of them have at least one minifigure. The average across all 171 sets is 2.71 minifigures per set.

The 8 sets in the advent calendar subtheme stick out with a high of 7.88 minifigures per set.

Another interesting piece of information is that of you pay an average of $12.26 per minifigure at retail price.

Thanks for reading and I hope you find a use for some of these numbers either in your own writing or your own investment decision making.