BrickIndex Spotlight: Winter Village Bakery #10216

This section of my personal blog will be dedicated to small posts about those sets that have performed the best over the past six months, namely those that are included in Brickpicker's own BrickIndex. As the Re-Make Impact Evaluation section, I hope to publish this one on a somewhat regular basis.

I am not sure about how many of you out there make use of this interesting feature, but the way it works is using eBay's sold listings data in order to see which sets have been selling the most and for the most money in the past half year. It is very useful, as it can help you make decisions about purchasing sets that have already been retired but that have yet to reach their highest point, meaning that even if for some reason you missed on a particular set while it was still on the shelves you can go ahead and try to ride the wave while it climbs in value and make significant profits.

To start this section, I decided to go with a set that has been talked about in the forums as of late: the Winter Village Bakery.

At this point, the Bakery currently holds 2nd place in the BrickIndex with a 99.84% growth over the past six months. Keep in mind that it was only a little over a month ago that this set was listed as Retired in LEGO S@H, something that caught a lot of people by surprise, since for a few weeks it had only been listed as Sold Out while the Post Office was the one listed as Retired.

In the month of April this set grew almost 20% in value relative to March and had a price (New) of around $124. Considering that the period of high growth or at least the price spike for this type of set has traditionally been in December, I am very excited about how good this has been doing so far this year. Come this Christmas, we will probably see it hit close to $150 if not more, in my opinion. Remember, that in April the news of its retirement were still not official.

Now, how can the investor benefit from this type of information? Well, in the past few weeks we have seen several threads asking questions about a good price to get this set even well above retail pricing (around $100 or so if I remember correctly). The answer to that questions will of course vary according to the expectation of each investor, but by taking a look at the data above I believe that even at that price you will still be able to make some nice profits as early as this year and even more if you decide to hold until the 2014 holiday season.

The Winter Village sets are really limited in terms of availability relative to most of the other LEGO sets, and that is part of their appeal and one of the reasons they perform so well in the secondary market. In my opinion, getting this set in the low 100s will still allow you to make a decent ROI, but it is up to you to decide if it is good enough based on your own investment strategies and expectations.