Want A Buyer/Dealer Who Will Pay Fair Market Value in NJ/PA

[roundpotwoman]

I had a last straw event recently- someone broke into my garage while I was away and took 10 beetle front hoods that were in NICE condition- one was late 50's, 6 were 62-66,and 3 were 68-71. I had set these aside for the 6 bugs I was planning to restore when I finally retired but I'm tired of having to worry about theft, finding a body person who is competent to do some of the trickier rust repair, dealing with the subtle but real discrimination in the hobby due to my sex, and so forth. I think the classic beetles are extremely well designed cars but after being screwed so often I want to cut my losses and get almost entirely out of the hobby. I had some 200 cars and parted out possibly possibly another 100 cars from 1984 through 1993 and while I sold or was swindled out of over half of it I still have a fair amount of stuff left. Can anyone recommend someone reputable or at least warn me about the crooks out there so I can avoid being screwed again? I will be doing a little research to try and determine what stuff is worth as well but I would love to find someone who could take a large percentage off my hands without trying to shaft me again. Thank you.

[CanStan]

Are you saying you have ~50 Beetles worth of parts? I think you'll have a difficult time offloading a huge inventory in one sale for anything more than pennies on the dollar.

It would also depend on exactly what you have. Lots of fan shrouds, doors, and big parts, or boxes of little bits? 50's and 60's parts? Or 70's stuff?

Having parted out lots of VW's myself (mostly Buses and Vanagons), it seems like, if priced right, 25% of parts will sell fairly quickly, 25% will sell eventually (over the course of several years), and the remaining 50% will sit around forever because nobody even wants it for free, so it makes its way to the dump.

A lot of the big parts (doors, fenders, hoods, seats, etc.) have some value to the person that needs them, but they are too big to store for anyone who doesn't specifically need them.
I was at a swap meet recently and someone had hauled all sorts of big parts like that, and they were all priced at $5 each. He may have sold a couple items, but almost all of it went back home with him. I guarantee it wasn't worth his time and effort to bring all that stuff.

For someone to buy a huge lot of parts, haul them to somewhere they can inventory, photograph, make ads for, list online, organize and store, it's hard to make a profit on that. Then come the emails from potential buyers asking questions and trying to package parts, driving to the post office to ship them out.

If I was offered a truck load of parts for free, I would probably decline it, unless there were a bunch of obviously valuable parts I knew I could make some money on easily.

So I guess, to answer your question, you'll have to give us a better idea of exactly what you have, and hopefully someone can point you in the right direction.

[pondoras box]

The problem is large collections are hard to sell as one large lot. First of all I’m not paying full value for stuff I’m probably never going to need. I’m taking a gamble on whether I can move it on and storage etc… the buyer has to consider their value on their time too, Monday through Friday that’s about 60$ per hour for me. Then I have to load transport sort clean and store all that stuff until I then have to try to find a buyer to hopefully make my money back plus a small profit. So it might not be what you want to hear but I am having a harder time moving stuff, especially the older stuff. So it might seem I am trying to swindle you in large buy outs but I promise you I’m doing you a favor buying out large hoards of parts.
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Looking for anything from Hal Casey Motors out of Hamburg New York, from license plate surrounds to matchbooks.

1961 23 Window (Bobo)
1965 11 Window (Zelda). https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=563183
1965 13 Window (Lucas)
1957 Oval ragtop
1960 hardtop
1964 hardtop
1965 hardtop
1973 standard bug
https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=804912
1988 Cabriolet VR6 conversion
Plus a lot of other rusty junk

[Abscate]

The value of large hoards of VW parts is scrap metal. Don’t fall for the sunk cost fallacy, you’ve already lost money on hoards in the time you spent acquiring them and storing them. The VW segment is a low budget, no money crowd so the best deal to take is the first one thst comes

There’s no reason to hoard. When you retire, there are plenty of projects to buy at whatever stage you like.
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