Not All Appraisals Are Apples to Apples
Appraising most items is straightforward. Form an opinion of the condition, age, scarcity, and comparative sales of the piece depending on your objective, whether that’s insurance purposes, estate planning, divorce, auction, or sale.
Things get more difficult when artifacts are one-of-a-kind or rare pieces. In 2016, we dealt with this exact dilemma working with the appraisers evaluating the sale of our collection to the Canadian Museum of History. We had a lot of one-of-a-kind or rare items, and comparatives were extremely difficult to find. A key part of the collection consisted of 20 rookie contracts for NHL Hall of Famers including Syl Apps, Tim Horton, George Armstrong, and Teeder Kennedy along with the last contract Bill Barilko signed as a Maple Leaf.
When an NHL player signs a contract, there are three copies: one for the team, one for the league, and one that stays with the player. The copies in our collection came from Maple Leaf Gardens—they were the team versions. They were also in pristine condition; once they were signed and slipped into the players’ files, they remained there until the building closed. The appraisers were in a quandary because they couldn’t find equal comparatives. So, they relied on what they could find: contracts from average players that had sold at auction for a few hundred dollars apiece.
Now, there were a few problems with this strategy, the most obvious being that, in a market where history matters above all else, it put no value on the historical significance of these items. The appraisers wanted an easy comparison—apples to apples, contract to contract. But in instances like these you have to be creative. I decided to search for contracts of players equal to the level of those in the collection. There weren’t any.
Another idea was to find athletes of equal abilities in another sport and use those. In one instance I compared Teeder Kennedy to New York Yankee Mickey Mantle. They were both Hall of Famers, similar in terms of stats vs peers, championships won, individual awards, team appeal, and length of career. Mantle’s rookie contract sold at auction in 2004 for US$143,000. Several more of his contracts later sold for more than US$40,000 each.
The appraisers disagreed, sticking with their original valuations. They tried to justify themselves: Mickey Mantle and the New York Yankees were 10x more popular than Kennedy and the Leafs! Even if that were true, Kennedy’s contract would still need to be valued at US$14,300. Then I discovered that a set of 10 contracts belonging to unspecified Baseball Hall of Famers had sold at auction for US$183,000. Whatever my contracts were worth, it was a lot more than a couple of hundred dollars each.
The contracts revealed a common hurdle in the appraisal of rare and one-of-a-kind items: An equal comparative might not exist. The appraiser’s challenge is to get creative, to go outside the context of a rare item and find a way to value not only what it is but who it belonged to and what it means as part of a larger history. Otherwise, they’re not doing their job. We never did settle on a value for those Leafs contracts—in the end, I removed them from the sale.
Valuing rare and one-of-a-kind items isn’t easy, nor should it be. Don’t be afraid to ask pointed and direct questions of the appraiser, about individual items, and about their expertise in the area of concern. A good appraiser should be able to explain their reasoning, walking you through how they came up with a value for a particular item. They shouldn’t be talking about apples when what you’ve got is a $1,000 melon.