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I recently bought a huge lot of the first rounds of the HP LEGO line, and found really cool how well they fit together to make the complete Hogwarts Castle with almost every single room, as well as some of the other locations. The newer 4842 is definitely the best looking HP castle, but to be honest had I been into this back when the original sets were released I would have probably preferred those to the new ones. A little video where you can see all of the sets put together:

What I do for flipping is look at Amazon's top sales ranks, especially in November/December. Those items Amazon is going to have a tough time keeping in stock. Even when they get a shipment of 100 or so in, they last most times like an hour tops. I scout those items then. I've been making a killing on the TMNT line (mostly the regular Turtles, and the key villains like Shredder.), Marvel Titan Series (7.99 at Toys R Us this week, I bought every Titan figure at TRU and Target and Walmart using Price Match). I increased my sales by thousands of dollars this week alone. I had run out of items to sell at FBA, and my sales which used to be 3000 to 7000 a day in early to mid December were dwindling to only several hundred a day. After buying up a ton of Turtles and Marvel Titans, my sales are back into the $3000 range. And a lot of that is profit too, almost half. Every day I get more stuff to sell. I had to do this flipping because it's too late to ship into Amazon and sell, so I'm fulfilling myself and I have to say it's been a lot of fun and a lot of work. But definitely worth it and definitely successful. A good scouting app is crucial though. I use Profit Bandit. Tells me my expected profit after factoring in all Amazon fees and shipping. It also tells me the crucial sales rank, so I know what items to avoid.

Thanks. I will give an update tomorrow on everything that is going on and why I did this change now. I just needed to get this cut over today. There are still some finishing touches to go on this and some tweaks. It will get there.

Hence the "retiring soon" label on the shop @ home site.

Ok, so many of you have noticed that there has been an update to the home page and content section. Overall I am happy that the transition has gone pretty good. Again, it's not something I wanted to do, but here are a few reasons why it needed to be done. Back in June is when we did the Forum upgrade. This I am happy about. The forum has been great and much better than what was there before. When we did this upgrade, I felt it would be good to utilize the tools that came with it and keep the system for the most part unified. The blog area did its job but it's actually a negative for the site. Overall its horrific for SEO (search engine optimization). This site in many cases fell off the charts for all the content that we had. I really don't think Google and the others really cared for find the blogs under /forum directories. So users are not finding the content anywhere near the top of the list. This may not be important for you, but its super huge for us. Using Wordpress, which is a true content management system, I will be able to do much better SEO techniques so searchers can find our content. It also was very hard to find the latest content. The other system had a horrible way to display the content. It drove me nuts. There is a huge update to the forum coming in early 2014. It looks very good and I am excited to get it on here. The problem that I saw coming was it was going to be very hard to upgrade. We made so many enhancements to this system with hooks/plugins that everything would probably break if we upgraded or we would have to wait a very long time to figure out if it would work. By switching all the content to Wordpress, I can remove all of the extra hooks and get it back to a basically default system which is great news. Brickpoints will now be handled on the Wordpress side. I have everyones totals, so even though you may see 500 points right now, over the next few days I will do an update and merge the totals. We will be able to do a few more things with this system and we will update you on that later, but one nice feature is that we will be able to award brickpoints for people that login daily. It's a great way to reward our loyal members. This conversion needed to be done and made live so that I can update all the brickpoint code in Brick Classifieds. Member Blog Writing - There will not be separate blogs anymore for members. Any blog articles that will be written are going to be fit right into the site. So that means Brickvesting Articles, Evaluation Articles, High End Reviews. We can create tons of categories to show great content. You will get all the good tools of Wordpress to work on your article. All you need to do is click the Dashboard link on the home page/side bar in the blog area, or click +New in the header in the blog area. That will take you to the dashboard and you can create a new article. We will get a notification when you are ready to submit for publishing. Ed will be announcing a new article contest in the very near future so get ready Brick Classifieds - I have gotten my butt kick at work and with travel over the past few months. It's been hard finding the time to get in and wrap this up, so I apologize for the delay. I am off for the next two weeks and I have already forewarned my wife that I will be chained to the desk to put the finishing touches on the site to have for you in 2014. I think it will be good timing that the holidays are over and we all know there is a huge surplus of Lego to sold. So get ready. Price guide will be the next huge hit. Once Brick Classifieds is out there and we are collecting feedback, we will be hard at work overhauling the price guide and Brickfolio. This will also be the start of creating Brickpicker Premium. We will give more details on all this, but from what we have put together for features, I don't think anyone will be disappointed. So bear with me for a day or two. I have already squashed a few bugs, but there is some more to optimize and fix. I know there are some weird issues with the mobile template and I will get to that. Thanks for reading my wall of text.

This is a Great Halo Mega Bloks investment set and its dirt cheap at Toys R Us. Regular $179.99, on sale $129.99 plus buy one get one 40% Off. I got 4 Last night on line, comes to $110.00 a piece, I got 4 more at the Stores today. They didn't want to do it as in the store it does not show up as Buy one get one 40% Off. So you should get it online. Most big Halo sets do very well down the road. and this is the second biggest set ever made for Halo. Box is big and Heavy. Ed http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=24075646&cp=&parentPage=search

Hello everyone........ My name is Scott and I am a Brickaholic....... I have been on the wagon for years but about 4 months ago I hit the bricks hard...... I'm just now getting my feet under me and the wife is not to pleased......it could be worse.....my old addictions were comics, baseball cards, hot wheels......and Star Wars figures....... But she seems to be encouraging this one......My 15 year old daughter helps me put the sets together........My eyes are not as good as they once were.... Well, that is me and I am an Brickaholic....... Hope to meet all of you at the meetings......

I waited too long for buying and listing Dolphin Cruiser sets on eBay / Bricklink (starting this week). Nevertheless, I can flip just about every older set (Cars, Toy Story, new, old, no box, with box, incomplete) but not a frakin DC. Now Amazon has them back in-stock for $67. Thus, I'm done flipping. Not because it doesn't work (because it does) but it isn't for me. I compare flipping to my past days as a "for pleasure" daily stock trader. I got killed due to my timing. Then when I moved into 1-2 year stock investing, I made nice cash for 4 straight years before rolling that money into Lego instead of buying NFLX at $67/share

Sorry, I can only think of "Oh look at me! I'm a flippin' dolphin" from Finding Nemo....

no issues with his post. it was a learning experience for me. i'm glad it was a minor flop. my xbox one sales last month was also a sorta flop. only sold one for $680 and had to return 2 units. no biggie. hey, no one except a few on this site can flip older sets like me anyway - ha

Is there something funny about another site member's misfortune?

I'm in the same boat. The only time I've ever been successful in flipping was by accident (I didn't even know what I was selling was "hot", I just looked at sold prices, priced mine similar, and it was gone immediately). I do much better with steady listing, etc. Now that I'm dealing in some repeatable merchandise (7 Captain America minifigures, 4 Bat Boats, whatever), I do pay attention to sudden bursts of sales so I can raise my prices on remaining inventory, but that's about as clever and spot-on as I can manage.

No, I am taking credit for everything. I want all the power!!! Yes, I will update all that when I am doing brickpoints, etc.

Personally, I would go with the faster method. Just bag them as you take them apart, no need to get too worried about it as buyers usually just don't care.

As long you are putting us over your wife, thats whats important Looks good so far.

I still need to get my hands on these. Waiting for some sort of discount opportunity first I wish Disney had released a Frozen set with this wave. It would have done sooooooooooo well. Imagine an ice castle built entirely out of clear/ice blue bricks...and maybe a nice big white base plate too. Add an Elsa and Olaf the snowman and you're gold. Edited to add: Hope they start selling these in the Disney Store too (Like the LR sets). Got some Kidstuff coupons for the Disney Store that I could use...

Quick rundown: Architecture - targeted toward AFOLs (that have investment $). Two sets are officially retired and have great ROIs from MSRP: 21001 John Hancock and 21016 Sungnyemun. Both had lower production runs than most other Architecture sets, so that also may factor into their appreciation. The Amazon sellers went crazy selling Architecture sets for double and triple MSRP this holiday season, so there's gotta be some demand for these sets. There is a Frank Lloyd Wright subtheme that some people speculate will take off after retirement since FLW has great name recognition among non-Architects, and a couple of these sets may retire this cycle. Technic - Sets usually do well post-EOL, but there haven't been any Market Street or Cafe Corner blow out winners. Since 2005, average ROI of a Technic set is 107%. Technic fans tend to like the construction vehicles, especially cranes. Read my two blog entries for more info here and here. The first reviews retired sets and the second estimates ROI of current sets based on a linear regression model.

This is just a guess but I noticed something different about this Christmas vs last Christmas: Lots of shelves at Walmart, Target, etc. are pretty bare. At one location I checked out yesterday, the entire LEGO isle was cleaned out. I am not sure if the stores are using a smarter demand-analytics or if the LEGO investing-craze is taking over, but either way, I am expecting any LEGO clearances to be slim-picking this year.

This topic has just been moved under the "General Buying & Selling" category now which is down a ways on the main forum page. Hopefully having this among the other two topics will make finding them easier for everyone.

Digging the new front page Macks

Can you post a link or some pics?

Well played sir

88 41999s of of bricklink for 699.00 each. Super excited!

Do I get commissions for recommending this?

I have a wholesale account with EE. I will call my contact over there and see what kind of information I can get out of him.

Nothing wrong with being a casual investor. Even big fish started out as small fry. For myself, I buy one of anything with the exception of battlepack/parts type sets and ones on heavy discount. It's all a matter of knowing yourself and working with what you have.

Rubbish. Businesses use debt all the time to fund their operation. It's called leverage. Not many businesses have a 0% debt to equity ratio, and if they do their owners are often not using their position to leverage for expansion properly. I run my Lego operation like a business. Some of it is funded through debt. As long as returns outstrip the cost of that debt then there is no problem doing so.

Lady yesterday thanked me for "saving Christmas."... One guy who bought a DC off Craigslist from me today for $100 congratulated me on my "use of capitalism and the free market." Lol

LOL just because we have different opinions does not mean we want to scare folks... I have no intention of buying one even if ''scared'' guys run selling them for 100$....

Agreed, i think there are a lot more sets out there than people realize. IMO people who do have the set are just holding it demanding higher prices, after all most of us have had the set for years, i didnt keep the the FB in my closet for 3 years for a $10 profit, i wont consider selling until it doubles.

Good that you bring this up, and I would be open to paying that yearly fee for as many listings as you think fair. It reduces transactions and time for everyone. This is not strictly about the Classifieds, but something I had been meaning to bring up regarding the ads. Personally, it just not make sense for me to advertise right now just because I am a very small time seller with a small inventory, and I feel this is geared up more to the high volume kind of guys. One thing I think you should consider is offer some kind of free trial of whatever length you consider appropriate. This way you will show those who sign up how much their sales or traffic increases by advertising on the site, making it more likely for them to pay for the service in the future.

I'm being super nosey here but did you pick up all these sets at the same store and if so where? Just curious if you made one stores day or you spread it out......that is a ton of cash!!!!!! Multiple stores, varied sales, bought these all over the past 6-7 days. super jealous! Congrats hope those sets make you some money!! Looks like they will.