It is essential to understand where antiques emerge. Many antique shoppers make the mistake of misunderstanding the process by which antique items are found. Many dealers and collectors waste precious time searching in sites where they believe that they are in great abundance. But a proper understanding of where antiques originate seems to have eluded many well meaning antique collectors and dealers.
It is simple, silly.
If you want to find fresh-to-the-market collectibles and antiques, you need to go where they are in great abundance and where they live! Antiques do not originate at flea markets or auctions, or at antique shows. Antiques emerge in people’s homes. This is a primary truth for 99% of all antiques that you will ever notice.
Another truth that many collectors overlook.
The other plain fact is that most antiques that you are most likely to get a great deal on live in older people’s homes. As a general rule, young people do not have antiques in the abundance that older people do. Why? Because older people came from a generation that saved everything, you will find that they have kept it all a majority of the time! From the 1950’s CE, toys in the closet to the old toaster that was too good to throw away, older families still have most of everything they ever have purchased.
Where will you invest your “prime-time?”
Recognizing these two fundamental truths about where antiques survive begs a big question. Knowing that antiques at homes and not necessarily at collectibles and that antiques are most likely to live in older people’s homes, where will you be trying to spend a majority of your prime time? It took me years to learn the following principles.
- To buy more authentic antiques, you have to see more antiques.
- To see more antiques, you must look at more household accumulations consistently.
- To achieve this, you simply must get into more people’s homes where the antiques are technically found.
Understanding and knowing these principles will put you light years ahead of your competition! Believe me, I know collectors and antique dealers, and most of them find their artifacts through one of only five methods. They find them through
- garage/estate sales,
- auctions,
- flea markets,
- “goodwill” type stores,
- and “pickers.”
If you want to be strangely triumphant, you have to go where the antiques originate. It’s time to concentrate on that and only that! That focus will take you farther than you ever thought possible!
