Leaderboard

So, you've stumbled across brickpicker.com and are overwhelmed by the number of different threads, blogs and sets. First, welcome to this community. Lots of users will happily welcome you, others, maybe no so much. Especially if you populate different threads with a variation on 'what should I buy' or 'is this a good set to invest in'? I'd argue both of these questions (other than gifs and sarcastic rejoinders) form the basis of every single thread, so instead of asking about a particular set, check out the thread dedicated to that set and start at the beginning. I can almost guarantee that some posters like it (some will even give logical reasons why) as an investment and some posters don't (also, sometimes logical). It is your job to weigh these pros and cons and decide where your opinion rests. You, of course, are free to post questions like the two mentioned above, but the answer will probably just be rehash of things already mentioned in the thread earlier. That, and forum members may be slightly less inclined to be helpful if they feel you posted it because you are too lazy to go back and read the whole thread. They might even be sarcastic/mean about it. A tidbit of Advice If you've read the thread and still want advice, at least try to be specific. Perhaps state the price and quantity you are considering and your ideal hold time. I bet a post that asks a question in this manner will be much better received. I know I'd probably answer this question with a little more insight and help than I would otherwise offer. Now, that is for a single set which has a dedicated thread. What if you are a new investor/collector/browser or Lego aficionado and you want to ask about several sets at once? I offer you this, a shopping list of what you should be buying today (according to me). I am looking for these same sets for one reason: they are either sold out or retired from either the Europe or North America shop at home and I believe they aren't coming back. I also believe that they have some potential, and carry a very low risk because they are becoming harder to find at MSRP or on sale anywhere. That isn't to say they can't be found – some might be found quite online still, depending on your market. Others might be in store only, so this shopping list is a handy thing to check when out with the family browsing retailers and trying to kill time. Veegs' Awesome Quick Guide of the Best Hopefully Soon to be Officially Retired or Already Retired in Some Markets Lego Shopping List. (Items may come back into stock. Not an official guarantee. Veegs is not responsible for your investment choices. Success rate may vary wildly.) Architecture: A nice range for all budgets! This line is one of my favorites, and I think the new Cityscapes, while neat, aren't as desirable as the standalone sets, which will hopefully push demand for older sets. Availability in Canada isn't great, but I think Barnes and Noble in the US still have some of these (your area may vary). No clue about Europe or other markets, but I'd keep my eyes peeled for any of these. Imperial Hotel 21017 Villa Savoye 21014 United Nations Headquarters 21018 Bradenburg Gate 21011 Leaning Tower of Pisa 21015 Seattle Space Needle 21003 At this point, I'm a buyer of any/all of these at MSRP CITY: Quite a few City sets qualify for my list, but these are two I particularly like. The Ice Breaker was a Toys R Us exclusive (at least in Canada) and boats are, in short, awesome. The Snowplow is pretty cool, and there is no remake (yet) on the horizon. Could this be the next Logging Truck? (I bought a lot of them...still not enough) Unique City sets often do well, and despite the constant police/fire sets, the themes overall CAGR% is rock solid, so there is money to be made on this theme with the right sets. I'd include Coast Guard Patrol 60014, too, if you can still find it. Arctic Ice Breaker 60062 Snowplow Truck 60083 Disney Princess: I am a huge Princess fan. I think this theme is on the cusp of doing some great things for investors, and have a separate blog in progress. For now, though, I think this is the best pick of the four that meet the sold out/retired criteria. Only Rapunzel set so far (minus a 2014 polybag) and a massive fan base (including my daughter). Disney toy collectors are out there (my daughter watches so many Disney un-boxing videos and such...I experience it first hand) and I doubt we're getting another Rapunzel set anytime soon or a remake – rumors have Belle coming this summer. I love this set. Rapunzel's Creativity Tower 41054 Friends: Quite a few others on the sold out/retired list but I gravitate towards these two. The Mall is a good anchor set for any town, and the last large Friends set to retire (Riding Camp) did well. I think this will do just fine in 12-18 months. I opted for the Beach House over a couple other mid-sized sets because Heartlake seems to have a boatload of stores but not that many houses. The new Emma's House and Livi's Mansion (although the mansion seems smaller than Emma's house?) bring some balance, but I think this set is one folks will pay double MSRP for to add to their collection. Heartlake Shopping Mall 41058 Stephanie's Beach House 41037 Ideas: Gorgeous set, and the growth in the European market has me believing in this set more every day. From the dedicated thread for this set I know folks are still able to find this in North America and use coupons or other magic to get it on sale. Your skill level and experience may dictate that, but I still think it is a great set at MSRP. Birds 21301 Pirates: Short run for a theme, and this is the flagship of the line. Still floating around at MSRP in Canada, but plenty got in on sale recently. I suspect if it is available around you, you can probably wait and get it on sale. Unlike others on this list, I'd prefer this at least 20% off before going nuts. The Brick Bounty 70413 Marvel: I was going to include Guardians of the Galaxy but I've already discussed those sets here: Ant-Man is growing like Wolverine's Chopper Showdown did and should be sought out in your region and purchased. Easy to store and probably easy to ship, great set for a brand new investor to track down and buy. Check recent sold listings on eBay to see what I'm talking about! Ant-Man Final Battle 76039 Star Wars: These will be the hardest to find, even at full retail price. In case you didn't know, a new Star Wars movie came out in December 2015!!! There are a few others I'd throw on this list, too, but I think these four are the best of the recently sold out/retired lot. At least in the North American market. Imperial Star Destroyer 75055 AT-AT 75054 MTT 75058 Mos Eisley Cantina 75052 The Hobbit: Stragglers are still out there from the third wave. It had the shortest run that I can remember from any/all of the Lord of the Rings or Hobbit waves and scarcity drives demand. Impressive sold listings for Lonely Mountain and Mirkwood Elves so I'd snap up remaining stock of this final wave. Unlikely to ever be made again and a huge fan base, coupled with the fact that there are no decent Medieval sets on the horizon (I'm not counting Nexo Knights, people!) There are many other sets that fit my criteria (sold out or retired in at least one market) but I think these are your best bets, even at MSRP. That being said, I happily nabbed plenty of sets not on this list but at a discount. Obviously, if the set is sold out/retired and you can get it for clearance prices, you probably don't need me to tell you to consider it (unless it is Ninjago, The Lego Movie or Chima, then consider longer...still might not be a great buy in) and probably nab it. Remember items marked clearance probably won't be in that store when you come back, so don't hesitate too long. Do a quick check of Brickpicker values or a scan of recent sold items on eBay, and if you see it trading significantly above the clearance price I'd probably advise pulling out the plastic and buying. Also, as per my exclusives 2016 article, no need for a new investor to start throwing money at exclusives! I doubt we're getting a surprise winter/spring retirement of a bunch of huge sets (sarcasm – I expect zero, maybe one Star Wars set around May the 4th) so put your money into sets that are already primed for post-EOL growth. Probably the safest place to put cash, and you can get your feet wet selling some of the sets on this list tomorrow (Ant Man, for example) or in a few months. I daresay all of the sets on my list will be able to be sold for a decent profit in 9-10 months. Low risk, short hold time (if needed, most will benefit from longer holds before plateauing but nothing wrong with cashing out sometimes) and good to great upside. Winner, winner, buy BigBlueDogBricks a chicken dinner. All photos courtesy of brickpicker.com, opted for one per theme discussed otherwise I felt it would be a little too picture-happy. Happy Hunting, Veegs

One of the most exciting times for a LEGO investor results from visiting LEGO S@H (LEGO's online storefront), looking for a particular set and suddenly realize there is a tag with the following message: "Retired Product"; Expectation and hope suddenly becomes joy. If you are reading this article, odds are you are already familiar with the concept of EOL (End Of Line), but just in case I think it would be appropriate to summarize what it means. LEGO produces different sets along the year, and each design has a planned life cycle that only the company Execs. are aware of. Once this cycle is completed, the set goes out of production to make room for a new design, usually meaning that to acquire the already retired set a prospective buyer will need to go to the secondary market (Us!). As with anything, this decrease in supply will, hopefully, translate into an increase in set value and help the investor get a decent return of his/her investment. What is the problem, then? If we know that sets retire after a couple years of being in production why do we even worry about exactly when this will happen?; Well, that's the million dollar question, LEGO is now known for being very secretive AND not really consistent when it comes time to retire a particular set. This means that while an specific modular might retire 2 years after introduced, the next may last 3 or 4 years before it is pulled out of the shelves. Having no concrete knowledge of when a set is retiring transforms into a dilemma for almost every single investor. With limited funds and an objective of maximizing profits and turnover, purchasing sets that are as close to retirement as possible becomes the most efficient way to be successful. Of course, this means that, occasionally , some investors will completely miss out on a popular set that retired before they expected OR will be left holding onto sets that will not retire for 2 or 3 more years! Tying their money, and space, for such a long period of time is definitely not the best way to make their business as efficient as possible. But, how can we as investors have any clue about when a particular set is to be retired? Well, there is really no clear cut answer. Even though there are some clues and events that may indicate a set is nearing retirement, there is usually an understandable controversy surrounding every single one of the "leading indicators". My point is that, while I tried to collect and summarize some of the possible signs suggesting retirement, none of these should really be taking as the one and only guide when developing an investing strategy. My objective is only to list them and give mostly new investors an idea of some of the things we talk about more deeply in the forums. LEADING INDICATORS: 1- Retiring Soon Tag Clearly, one of the most telling events in a set's life is when LEGO S@H assigns the tag "Retiring Soon". Even though it may seem that this event pretty much guarantees a sooner than later retirement, the process is definitely not as straightforward. One of the things that may happen is a set with the tag lingering on the shelves and online storefront for months after the tag has been assigned. This could be a way for LEGO to "Clearance" a set without actually lowering the price, basically pushing potential buyers to make a purchase before the set goes away forever. Another thing to consider is that most of the products that retire never even get the tag assigned to them at all. Think of the Haunted House model that according to the majority of the investors is as close to official retirement as it is going to get. The set never had the Retiring Soon tag, it basically went from being In Stock, to Backorder and finally to Sold Out. This is a more common transition, especially with the larger exclusives. 2- Sudden, and deep, discount in official LEGO outlets As above, this is another sign that most of the sets do not ever show. However, opposite to the Retiring Soon tag, once a set experiences a deep discount from LEGO stores and S@H (think 30% or more), it is almost a certainty that it will be retired within the next couple of weeks. As you can imagine, once a set is discounted in this manner it goes to Sold Out status in a matter of days if not hours. [img url="http://community.brickpicker.com/uploads/2014/10/Untitled1.png" cks="responsive"] The image above shows sets with both the Retiring Soon tag and the "Sale Price" discount. 3- LEGO Limits This is one of the most controversial items on the list, and for good reason. As most of the members in the forums know, LEGO is known by limiting the amount of a same set you can purchase, especially the hard to find exclusives. Most of the time, the limits start at 5 per household and seem to be lowered as a set is nearing retirement, usually to 2 or 1. Having said that, there really is no clear evidence indicating that this pattern actually correlates to going EOL, and several sets a year completely deviate from this perceived pattern. 4- Time on the Shelves Again, a very difficult sign to interpret. It seems that in years past LEGO was a little more predictable when it came to figuring out how long a particular set would be available for. Estimates and comments seem to place the average availability of a set at around 2 years, but as most of you know LEGO seems to have been extending the life of popular sets for 4 or more years!. However, with some exceptions *cough, DS*, once a set has been available for 3 or more years and is sharing shelf space with newer and similar models (think Modulars), it is pretty safe to assume that retirement will come sooner rather than later, making it OK to start stocking up. 5- Production Run Codes For an introduction to Production codes, please go HERE This somewhat recent discovery can also be considered helpful to help determine potential EOL. If we as investors see a set available in 2015 that has been showing some of the other signs of retirement, and discover that the production codes indicate current inventory came from several months ago, it could lead us to believe that LEGO has stopped production of the set and is simply waiting for the last batch to be completely sold out. As with any of the other indicators, tread carefully when using production codes. 6- Retired Product Tag Finally, the Holy Grail of LEGO investing. Once a set is assigned this tag on LEGO S@H, its death is official. This is the tag that generates more joy and excitement among the community members and, other than being able to find the set at other retailers (notably TRU & B&N), it means that any opportunity to acquire this set is pretty much gone. Finally! In the end, the point is that there is no sure way to determine if a set is nearing its retirement. The best we can all do is take a look at all of these signs in aggregate and share our opinions in the forums hoping for that beautiful day when the Retired Product tag shows up in LEGO S@H. Thanks for reading.

After reading an earlier thread, I want to make a thread chronicling my own transition from LEGO “investor” to LEGO “seller.” I have received a ton of great advice on this site and have learned a few things along the way. I started the buying side of this in November 2012 and have completed my first several sales (November 2014). I want to point out some of the things that I learned here and did right and some things I didn't know and did wrong. Some of this information may be very basic for many of the advanced LEGO investors on the site, but some of the information might be able to help some of the novices out there nonetheless. BACKGROUND: A lot of the posts on the Brickpicker site, particularly those from the seller's side, seem to be from larger scale reseller types who have really been successful in creating a small business of LEGO buying and reselling. While those posts are often helpful, I first off want to say, that's not me and it is not my goal. I have a secure full-time middle class job which I enjoy. This is more of a hobby in which I can make a little money from, rather than a true investment that I'm going to send my kids to college with or pay for a retirement home when I get older. Those life priorities I have paid for by conventional means. My goal is to pay for LEGO sets that I buy for myself and my future kids with profits that I earn from selling other sets...and maybe earn a little extra cash on the side. The time I spend doing this is recreational to me and I won't be breaking down my hourly wage from how much I make from it. That being said, this has been much more fun than reading my 401k statements every quarter and I think I have the potential to do much better job if it was a competition. My ROI(Return on Investment) goal is to (on average) double my money on the sets I sell. I knew I would not spend more than $10k on this investment between the sets I want to keep and the sets I want to sell. The cash I used was sitting in the bank and was not my emergency savings. I only say that because I see people going into debt to buy LEGO sets on the site and that is a horrible idea. I also am not a "flipper," nor a "parter outer." My strategy from the get go was to hold and sell after EOL(End Of Line). BUYING LESSON #1 (WHAT TO BUY): CHOOSE WISELY...DO NOT BUY TWO OF THE SAME THING JUST BECAUSE YOU WANT ONE TO BUILD AND ONE TO RESELL. THE SET MIGHT BE A BAD INVESTMENT. As a child in the late 80's through the late 90's I played mostly with City Sets, though also played with a few Space, Kingdoms, Pirates, Western sets. I don't recall any licensed sets back then. Like Will Ferrell in The LEGO Movie, I had a whole city on a table (as a kid). After coming out of the "dark ages," one of the things that concerned me was that sets I would want to build later on would be EOL and would cost me a fortune. So many of my initial sets purchased were bought so I did not have to pay a ransom for them later on. Many of sets I bought two of...one for me and one for an “investment.” I'm pretty sure it has been suggested on here that you can't go wrong on buying sets you like and want to play with. Well if you are like me and like playing with City and other “generic” sets, that's a bad idea. I'm going to probably hit my goal on many of these City sets I have, but it will take a while and the ROI will be weak. I wouldn't say I was addicted to buying (liked the linked thread above), but in the beginning, I certainly did go on a buying frenzy on the outset. I would have been better off separating “play” set buys from “investment” set buys. Sometimes they are the same, but many times they are not. BUYING LESSON #2 (EOL): DON'T BUY NEW RELEASES AND TRY TO BUY AS CLOSE TO EOL AS POSSIBLE. My first major buys: An Ultimate Collector's Series Imperial Shuttle and a 10188 Death Star. The Imperial Shuttle went EOL and has doubled in price and the Death Star wouldn't even make up the selling fees if I sold it today. EOL, or in other words...when a set retires, means everything to my investing strategy. Buying towards the end of EOL is critical. In the beginning I bought several newly released sets and it's going to take me a long time to make money on them compared to the Imperial Shuttle which I bought right before EOL. Obviously, buying towards the end of EOL is a crap shoot, but I could have done more research and at least not bought new releases. In the future I will probably make many of my buys after the products have been out a couple of years. In some cases this may be too late or too early, but it should be better than buying new releases or stuff after one year. BUYING LESSON #3 (SPACE): SPACE COSTS MONEY, LACK OF SPACE CAN LIMIT SIZE OF INVESTMENT INVENTORY, FORCING TOUGH CHOICES. I have a decent sized home and had a bedroom mostly used for storage. The closest was the kind with the two sliding doors, maybe 4 feet deep by 8 feet wide. I filled it with about $8k in LEGO sets in 6 months. Thankfully it is in a cool dark area and had shelving. If I was paying for space, that would kill any profit I would be making as a small investor. My space was available and free and I think that is what keeps this type of “investment” profitable. If everyone had an empty closet lying around, there would be so much more competition. That being said, when my closet started getting full, I slowed my buying down and really started getting more focused on buying the sets I could make the most money off of. The lack of space made me a smarter buyer. My Brickfolio is at about $9K in purchases and I didn't feel the need to go all the way to my $10K initial goal. BUYING LESSON #4 (SET SIZE): MEDIUM TO LARGE SIZED SETS ARE THE BEST FOR MY STRATEGY. For various reasons, I bought a lot of small sets ($20-$40). As I progressed into the selling phase, I see why this is an issue. They don't make as much money and take more of your time. That being said, I'm also not a fan of the really big sets. They make me nervous as a small time seller. If I put all my money in a $400 SSD and get robbed by someone on Ebay, I'm done. I also don't think sets with that much value will increase as much percentage wise as a $100 set. Also with a large set you take up a lot of space and capital with fewer sets (see my Death star). The amount of people able to pay $300 for a set, vs $1200, is huge in my honest opinion. My goal in the future is to focus on investment sets in the initial $80-$200 range. That maximizes my time, storage space, and if I get burned, the sting won't be so bad. BUYING LESSON #5 (SALES VS MSRP): FOCUS ON QUALITY SETS, NOT ITEMS ON SALE. So I always love looking at all the sales info on here and have geared many of my buys to LEGO sets that are on sale. My particular area is a densely populated area of Southern California, so my best sale items are online (no clearance racks here). Most of my purchases have been discounted buys from Amazon. These sales have slowed over the last year, but in the beginning they were plentiful. But this led more to my buying even more City sets or other sets that are not going to have a high ROI. I waited a long time for the Haunted House to have some kind of discount. I got one for $10 under MSRP on Amazon at one point and decided to wait for a better sale to get more. Well it's EOL and I only have one. Huge mistake. I should have ponied up MSRP for a couple more. I would have been better off on focusing on what sets were going to have a high ROI, not what sets I could get the best discount on. BUYING LESSON #6 (WHAT TO BUY): BUY COOL SETS THAT ARE UNIQUE. Do not buy sets that will be re-released (most City). The safe bets are Modulars, licensed sets, UCS sets, Creator Houses, Trains and adult themed stuff. Try and go for sets that are neat and more unique. There is money to be made in every theme, but if you are trying to maximize your profits and time, do your research. THE TRANSITION: So over the last year I have slowed down on the buying. I figured I would start the selling phase next Christmas, but thanks to the new Jurassic Park Movie, I had to unload my Dino Theme this year. I had 10 Dino sets that needed to be sold before they are re-released. I am lucky in that in this particular situation of re-releases that I had a large advanced notice the Jurassic Park theme was coming out with the movie next year and the last Dino sets have been EOL over a year. SELLING LESSON #1 (POSTING FOR SALE): PAY CLOSE ATTENTION WHEN POSTING ITEMS ON EBAY...USE GOOD PHOTOS...MAKE THE POSTING CLEAN. Your sets are not unique snowflakes. There are multiples of sets for sale of basically anything that has been released in the last few years. I use eBay's Buy It Now and would consider myself a novice in using it. I would rather avoid the risk of an auction at this point and can sit on some sets for a while. While there are other ways to sell, this seems the most logical for me as a small time seller. I have never sold anything on eBay before, though I have been buying for years. There have been numerous threads on the fees, so I won't go into that. I don't post until I can make my net profit goal on sets and I figure fees into that. I would not describe eBay as hard to use, but it can be annoying. If you are posting numerous sets, it seems the settings reset to random things each time you try to make a new post (auction or BIN, shipping, payment types, posting time frames, etc). I had to be very careful and edit some things later on. One of my other part-time hobbies is photography. For less than five bucks I set up a light box for product photography. I already had the flashes and other stuff. I you don't have photo equipment you can still buy some cheap white posters and do this with a small camera. I see a lot of crummy cell phone pics on eBay and as a buyer, I would shy away from those. I posted over a few days before Black Friday. Next year I will post earlier for the holidays. I am not using a script and have a very short listing, but in the future I might move to a script. However, I see a lot of messy, cluttered, and ugly listings out there. Some of the posts dealing with eBay have put a healthy fear into me, so I do not accept returns and do not ship internationally. SELLING LESSON #2 (GETTING PAID): UPGRADE TO A PAYPAL BUSINESS ACCOUNT BEFORE YOU START...USE THE “IMMEDITATE PAYMENT REQUIRED” FEATURE. Now when people say moving from investor to seller is not fun, they forget about the best part...getting paid. Watching the money drop into your Paypal account...and tripling your money after a year and a half, is pretty awesome. But there are issues. Deciding on what to price a set takes some time and research. I have my collection in my Brickfolio and that helps, but every set is in different condition so all those variables have to be accounted for. Between used sets, parted out sets and people posting sets for ridiculous amounts way above the norm, I decided to price my sets towards mid range to make it easier. My first sale was a Buy It Now and the seller never paid. No email saying my kid did it, nothing. Not a major issue except it takes my product off sale for almost a week. Another listing a buyer took a couple of days to pay. During my research I discovered you can set your items to “Immediate Payment Required” for Buy It Now sales. I never saw this option when setting up my eBay listings. Further research showed it was under the advanced item listing AND I needed to have an active PayPal Business account for it to even be offered. I will be using “Immediate Payment Required” from now on. My next problem was PayPal. I have used it for a while to buy stuff, but never received money from it. After my first sale, I got an email from PayPal saying they would not accept the credit card to a “personal account,” which is what I had. Apparently this is not true anymore, but PayPal still sends out the email. I tried to research the difference between PayPal personal and business they don't say much and the fees are supposed to be the same. I eventually upgraded to a business account on PayPal. Also note there is a three week delay when you actually get the money. SELLING LESSON #3 (SHIPPING AND HANDELING): KEEP THE PACKING MATERIALS YOU GET...HAVE THE MATERIALS READY TO GO BEFORE YOU POST...GET A SCALE. This is where things get a little more challenging for me and makes me nervous. I chose to charge separate for S&H on eBay. I chose the “standard shipping” option and made up my own fixed rate. I pretty much guessed at the rates for my first group of sales. Most of the guesses were close, except for the boxes. KEEP YOUR BOXES. I can not stress this enough. I had boxes saved, but not ones for the larger sets. So as soon as I made my first sale I wandered on over to Office Max for shipping supplies. They had four box sizes. That was it. Target was worse. I had to go to a UPS store for large shipping boxes and I paid $5 for each of the boxes for my larger sets. Way too much. Had I saved my boxes I would be $10 richer now. I have also located a shipping store in my area now that will be better in price and selection for future sales. I should have had the packing materials ready to go before I posted the items. I bought a box re-sizer mention on these forums for my next batch to cut down on size and hopefully cost. Additionally, I didn't have a postal scale, so I used the bathroom scale and rounded up the weight on the box to be sure it was OK. I would rather do that then stand in line at the post office, but have since ordered a postal scale for less than $40. I used the eBay USPS shipping function to make, pay for, and print shipping labels. I liked this feature. Still being scared of getting burned, I bought insurance and signature confirmation and then took photos of the items in the packing material. I used mostly bubble wrap bought on sale to package my sales. CONCLUSION: In the end with my first batch of sales and after expenses, I more than doubled my investment money (On the Dino theme). So I'm on track. Had I done some of these things above, I could have done much better, but I consider this a success and this didn't feel like real or hard work. Hopefully, some of you learn from my mistakes and maybe some of the more seasoned LEGO investor/resellers have some advice to offer on things I noted above. I would consider myself still novice and have a lot to learn. I realize everyone might do things a little differently and I am certainly open to suggestions. Good luck with your LEGO investments.