Over the course of the summer I sold off a fairly large collection (300+ UR+ tokens).
I thought it might interest some people to see what things went for this last summer. I've put that data here:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EDfoTmKCBmrS16N78r8J6CajkPo0EfpWr-WLiRh9Hus/edit?gid=0#gid=0
The "Pct of Retail" column is an estimate of the sale price of the token relative to the retail price of that token on some of the larger token shops.
Things that I thought were interesting:
1. On average, tokens would sell for around 2/3rds of their retail price. This is true both overall, and within rarity categories (e.g. Legendaries sold for around 2/3rds of their retail prices, URs sold for around 2/3rds of their retail prices, etc.)
* Note however the URs in this collection were curated to my collecting tastes, so this may not generalize to the average value of all URs.
2. Frequently things wouldn't sell in the forums, and then would sell for higher that the forum asking price on eBay.
My advice to someone liquidating their collection and trying to get the most money out of it would be to alternate between eBay auctions and Forum listings, slowly dropping the price on each until everything is gone. (Don't forget you'll get ~10% less from ebay sales due to fees though - so selling for $100 on ebay is worse than selling for $93 on the forums!)
3. There were a fair amount of bargain hunters who would make lower offers than asking price, but then buy at the asking price when the lower offer was rejected.
This was in contrast to my past experience of selling tokens where usually rejecting a lower offer was the end of the potential transaction.
My advice to someone liquidating their collection and trying to get the most money out of it would be to stay firm on prices and slowly lower them over time.
4. I did get a few offers to buy the whole collection outright, and while I'm grateful for any offer, these offers were for less than a third of what I was ultimately able to get selling it myself.
I was offered around 20 cents on the dollar relative to retail prices for the whole collection, and ultimately ended up selling for around 63 cents on the dollar.
To me that points to a large degree of risk, uncertainty, and/or low sales volume in the secondary token market - with potential resellers seeking margins in excess of 200%.
In a healthy secondary market resellers would be happy with 40-100% margins.
