LEGO CITY: Fire vs. Police

Whether it is an exaggeration or not, in popular culture there has always been the perception of some sort of a friendly rivalry between the two main public service branches, the police and fire departments. I really have no idea about how big this rivalry, or if it even exists, in the real world, but I thought it would be fun to play with the idea in the context one the LEGO CITY theme, so later we will be examining which of the two has been the better performer over the years.

Before we do that though, I feel necessary to give a little background on the theme overall, even if it has been discussed some in previous articles. The CITY theme was first released in 2005 to replace World City as the next theme to feature most of the “town” sets LEGO has been released over more than a decade. At the time this article was written, the theme overall presented a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 13.03%, a figure above the average LEGO theme of 11.36 %. This could be attributed to the popularity of the theme with some of the most important LEGO customers, those being kids and AFOLs, due to some of the characteristics of the sets themselves that are out of the scope of this article. Let’s now focus specifically on the performance of Police and Fire themed sets.

Over the course of the years, Police and Fire sets have been one of the staples LEGO keeps producing almost continuously. Having your own fire or police station forms part of almost every single kid’s dream while growing up, and LEGO understands and capitalizes on that really well by always expanding both of those sub-themes and keeping them on the shelves year after year. Even more, AFOLs have proven to be another group that is very interested in the sets, not so much for traditional play but for recreating large and realistic looking cities.

Among both sub-themes, there has been a long list of really nice and varied sets; small, large, stations, boats, planes are just some examples. Furthermore, LEGO has been releasing some very interesting sets that deviate some of the more traditional ones we named before, like the more recent Police Dog Van or Bank and Money transfer, that add some more depth and realism to any city.
From an investor’s standpoint, there seems to be some sort of animosity towards some of the CITY sets that fall into the fire or police category, mostly due to something stated above: there are a lot of remakes and re-releases. This is an issue that a lot of investors worry a lot about while making their investment decision, because it would appear that if a set that retired just two years ago is re-released after such a short period of time, collectors and fans would opt for the newer and cheaper version rather than going for the old version that usually goes for above MSRP.

While some investors are right in their perception concerning remakes and their negative impact on growth, this does not necessarily mean that sets are investment losers. From some of the information you will see a little bit later in the article, you will be able to verify that several of the sets that have been re-released in some form or the other most of the time are very strong performers. In the case of CITY police and fire sets, the real issue with remakes is not really that hampers long term growth, but rather that the sets do not usually provide the possibility of making a decent return shortly after retirement (within a year of EOL). Some of these sets do take some time to appreciate substantially, but in the end they DO perform, so I would really recommend them only to those who really have a long term investment horizon rather than a short one.

Let’s now go into detail a little bit more. The following tables present all the sets that have been retired so far on both the police and fire sub-themes, leaving out the promotional sets and those that have less than 50 pieces.

Police

Fire

OVERALL WINNER: Police

*Note that the Police sub-theme has more recently retired sets than Fire does, a factor that could skew the CAGR higher.

It appears from the tables above that CITY police sets easily beat fire themed ones (I’m sure some of the law enforcement related members in the forums will be happy with those results). The average CAGR for police sets is around 15 %, while the fire themed sets “only” grow at about 10.6 % per year. Interesting to note is the fact that if we divided this themes out from the larger CITY and place each on Brickpicker’s overall them CAGR, police sets would place well above the LEGO average CAGR, while fire sets would place slightly below.

Going deeper into the numbers there are several things that I think are important to examine in this article. Note that each sub-theme could be divided even further in some categories like Stations, Boats, Helicopters and so on, that in my opinion give us a little more information about which specifics sets tend to do better than the rest overall.

First of all, you will be able to note that the station type sets, the ones that are re-released most of the time, do end up appreciating pretty well in the long term. In some cases they even turn out to be extremely good performers (7945 and 7744), while some of the newer ones, as you can see, have appreciated very slowly since they were retired. This trend fits well with what I talked about in a previous section.
A second thing I wanted to highlight was which sets have usually been the best performers among both themes. If you take a look at the table above, a very specific type of set immediately jumps out on both sub-themes: Boats. As it was examined on a previous EC article, boats and ships have usually been really solid choices when it comes to LEGO investing, and it would appear that also applies when considering smaller CITY sets. The 7906 and 7207 Fire Boats, along with the less traditional 7944 Hovercraft, have all more than doubled in value, while the 7287 and 7899 Police Boats have performed in a very similar fashion.

Finally, as with every theme, there have been some sets that have really not performed as good as we would like. Having said that, we really can’t expect every single set to be an investment home run, and it really all comes down to being able to pick the right sets at the right price.

Overall, I think you should be pretty satisfied by the overall performance of most Police and Fire themed sets. Even though you don’t really hear that many good things about them, mostly because they are there ALL THE TIME, their historical performance has proven to be a solid one, so you can definitely be sure that by putting a little work and research into these sets they can become a very important part of your diversified brickfolio.

To conclude, let’s go ahead and examine some of the CITY fire and police sets currently available:

7498 Police Station VS. 60004 Fire Station

Comments: These are the two most recent stations on both sub-themes, and they are extremely similar in almost every significant aspect. Both stations have pretty much the same amount of pieces, same MSRP and therefore same Price Per Piece ratio, also at first sight, you will note that even the building structures share some of the same design elements.

The Fire Station was just released a few months ago, while the Police Station is rumored to be closing in to retirement. It is somewhat hard at this point to determine which one will perform better in the secondary market, but just basing of historical data I would have to go with the Police Station.

WINNER: Police

60008 Museum Break-In VS. 4209 Fire Plane

Comments: The Museum Break-In set is one of those more unique sets that LEGO has been releasing more and more trying to expand the variety of Fire and Police sets beyond the more traditional sets. The set is really very cool looking and has some very nice details that enhance the looks of the recreated scene, like some paintings and other artifacts that the thieves are looking to remove, the museum itself, and the police helicopter. On the other hand we have the Fire Plane that is one of the best looking fire sets currently available, in my opinion. The plane comes with several 1x1 blue translucent bricks that are used to simulate the water dropping from the compartment to extinguish the fire, as well as some other nice features like a fire truck (that connects to the plane as well), a couple of “burning” trees and some other minor accessories. As much as I also like the Museum Break-In, LEGO planes overall have proven to be really great performers, so if I had to pick, I would definitely invest on the Fire Plane.

WINNER: Fire

4439 Heavy Lift HelicopterVS.60010 Fire Helicopter

Comments: The 4439 Heavy Lift Helicopter is a really cool design based on a helicopter design that is not seen that often in LEGO sets, if ever. The body of the helicopter is really big and comes with two rotors, one in the front and one in the back. On the fire side of things, we have the 60010 Fire Helicopter that has a very high price per piece in comparison, mostly due to the inclusion of the motorized winch piece. Leaving that aside, the helicopter is more traditional looking, but the set does come with an extra section where “fuel” canisters appear to have caught fire, so there is extra playability with that too. Both models have things I consider very unique, and that does not allow me to pick a winner in this match up.

Draw

7288 Mobile Police Unit VS. 4430 Fire Transporter

Comments: The Mobile Police Unit shares some similarities with the retired Police Command Centre, as they are both mobile police units. The performance of the Command Centre has not been that good at this point, and it has been retired already for a little more than two years. There are really not any redeeming features that would make me assume that this newer version will perform any better.

The 4430 Fire Transporter is a Toys R Us exclusive, something that could be considered a positive aspect since its availability will be fairly limited, but that not always translates into great future returns. Other than that, the set is very interesting and a mobile command center kind of set seemed to be missing from the fire sub-theme.

Winner: Fire

60007 High Speed Chase VS. 60005 Fire Boat

Comments: The High Speed Chase set is pretty cool on its own, as it includes a Chase McCain minifig, along with some features that are necessary in every high speed chase: a patrol car/truck, motorcycle and a very fast looking sports car. There are also some minor features like the spike strip, barriers and cones.

Having said that, I really think there is no way for the police set to be able to beat the Fire Boat. As we have talked about before, boats in both themes have proven to be one of the most successful investment choices along the years, and I really see no reason for this last version to be the exception.

Winner: Fire

Final Tally for Current Sets: Police 1 VS. Fire 3 (1 Draw)

So, despite Police sets being historically better performers than Fire ones, I really think that the current selection tilts the balance more in favor of the latter.

These sets examined above are not the only ones that are currently available, just the ones I really wanted to cover and that I felt could match up. The most important set I left out of this analysis was the 4440 Forest Police Station, that at this point is really one of a kind and could turn out to be a great investment as well.

Now that we finished that, I hope at least some of you who were not thinking that much about CITY fire and police sets as an investment may change your minds and at least take a closer look at some of them, there is really the possibility to earn great returns on some of these, especially boat and plane sets!

Thanks for reading