Appraisal Services – Only $250.00 for a standard house

We offer Appraisal Services for probate or general inquiries of estates when downsizing or dealing with a loved ones estate who is no longer with us.

Knowing the value of the chattels in an estate is essential and should be done at the same time you are having the property appraised. If you have multiple persons receiving shares of a loved ones estate or just looking to liquidate your own items and downsize it is a great time to have the items evaluated before discarding anything.

Cost: Our standard general estate appraisal is 250.00+hst this includes 2 hours on site cataloging and we spend a few hours preparing your appraisal. Most appraisals are 300.00/hr and for insurance or divorce appraisals you will want to have a more in depth appraisal done. Our appraisal is a fair market auction value appraisal that gives you a very good idea of what you can expect to receive if you liquidate your estate chattels or collections.

The two hours onsite is usually enough for a standard estate. Large estates or estates with large collections or a lot of items can take longer and additional time is billed at 50.00/hr. We do not charge travel time if you within 50km of Midland Ontario. Any further distance travel time is billed in addition to the appraisal at $0.50/km.

For larger estate we will bring additional staff to help catalog the estate, photos are taken and research is done on items such as art, designer furniture, coin collections, hockey card collections, collectable toys and such.

For estates with fine art, scarce tokens and coins, fine antique furniture or specialty collections such as military items or firearms we would require additional experts (who we have available for these circumstances) and additional costs are involved for this as well when required. We would recommend this to you ahead of time if we feel additional experts should be involved to give you a more precise value. We are experts with general content evaluations as well as antiques, most musical instruments, Canadian coins and currency and many collectables including glass, china, many vintage toys and more.

We DO NOT offer insurance appraisals, CRA appraisals or divorce appraisals.  This often requires a ISA certified appraiser.  We can recommend another company if you require a ISA appraisal for such a reason as we do not carry a ISA (International Society of Appraisers) certificate ourselves.  Possessing this certification requires a coarse and ongoing recertification that we do not have the time to commit to at this time.

Why get your items appraised by us?  Most people get them appraised to see if anything is worth selling before removing items from an estate.  Most people see the value in real estate and often overlook tens of thousands of dollars in value in the items inside the home. We often see people clearing estates to sell the property and throwing away literally tonnes of sellable estate items to clear way for the property to be sold. Something as simple as a tin in the garage, a trunk in the attic or a marble could mean thousands of dollars lost if that item is thrown away thinking it was worthless. And we are not kidding about the marble, a 2200.00 marble was found in a box of toys not to long ago in our area and one of the local pickers found it.

When your ready to sell…. We are a full service auction, we can come appraise your items and let you know what to sell and what to discard and we can assist you in selling the items when the time comes if you wish.  We can even clear the entire contents of an estate for you including the garbage if needed as long as the chattels are valuable enough to cover the costs of labor and disposal fees. We can also make you a cash offer to purchase all the contents or a larger cash offer to just pick what we think is saleable and leave the remaining items for either a charitable organization or disposal by you. Lots of choices and we can always recommend the best way to proceed after doing the appraisal.  Step one is always the appraisal for a full estate or large collections.

Surprise! Look what was found! Your used stuff is worth more than you think! And you never know what you will find when you start looking. Here are just a few things over the years we have  sold that may surprise you.

BACK OF A CLOSET ROLLED UP WITH ANOTHER TWO PAINTINGS
This was found in the BACK of a closet rolled up. It was painted by a famous native group of seven painter by the name of Carl Ray. It had damage and needed to be stretched onto a new canvas. It sold for just over 1000.00 as it was and the new owner restored it. Not bad for a rolled up painted canvas in the back of a closet!  Someone probably used the art stretcher for his/her own art and took this off the canvas and rolled it up and tossed it in the back of the closet! Wow… luckily they did not throw it away it is a spectacular piece of art especially now that it has been professionally restored.
FOUND IN A STORAGE BOX IN A LOCKED BREEZEWAY OUTSIDE THE HOUSE
This gold birks watch was found in a locked breezeway in a storage box. The watch was still running and fetched 625.00 on auction.  The estate had no idea it was in the box. In fact the estate did not even have a key to the room we found it in. One of our guys crawled through a very small window and opened the room up to get a lawnmower that we could see was in the room from the window.  We also found a blow up fishing boat, a bunch of unused garage items, and much more stored away in this room. The inaccessible breezeway room fetched well over 2500.00!
BOX FULL OF HOCKEY CARDS WITH 11 NEAR MINT KEN DRYDEN ROOKIE CARDS
Hockey cards, these were just the highlights we found in a box of hockey cards.  It had about 1000 1970’s cards in the box all in excellent condition however in the box as you can see were 11 Ken Dryden rookie cards 14 Darryl sitter rookie cards and 7 Guy LaFleur year two cards. In total the hockey card collection fetched over 7000.00!!  These 32 cards alone sold for over 4000.00. When it comes to hockey cards condition is everything. These were ungraded and the consignor wanted to sell them as they were. If they had have taken to time to get the cards graded as we suggested (like the winner did) these cards were actually worth over 10000.00 and the winner of the auction was very happy the consignor did not follow our advise and have them all graded.
CHECK UNDER YOUR FURNITURE AND IN THE BACK OF PAINTINGS AND PAGES OF BOOKS!
A very nice lady walked in one day holding a gold coin and said “I was vacuuming and found this on my floor under the couch and wanted to see if it was worth anything”. At the time gold prices were about 1500.00 an ounce and we said “Yes, about 1500.00” (I thought she was going to faint!) she said “I think it fell out of my couch!” we said “Where did you get the couch” (Obvious question!)… Turns out her parents recently passed on and she took the couch from the estate. I said “Did you parents live through the depression” and she answered “yes they did” I asked if she had other furniture from her parents estate and it turned out she kept a bookshelf but sold the rest of it online herself and donated some here in the Midland area.  I said “go home tonight and check the bookshelf, look for anything taped under it stapled to it or hidden in anyway on it … so she did and came back the next day with this 1oz gold bar in her hand and said “You won’t believe it, this was hidden under the bookshelf how did you know!” people who lived through the depression didn’t really trust the banks all that much and liked to hide coins and even money in furniture.

It sold for 1550.00 and the gold coin sold for 1600.00 … If you bought any used furniture in Midland you should check it really carefully cause I bet a few people in the area have gold coins and bars hidden in furniture from this ladies house! We found money in books, we never found any in paintings yet but we hear stories of finds hidden in the back of paintings too! Our friend pulled 30’000 dollars out of the walls of his late parents house! People did not always trust the banks.

FOUND IN A CROWN ROYAL BAG
Another gold coin found in a bunch of coins in a CROWN ROYAL bag a lady brought in. Usually it’s just marbles in those crown royal bags!  Unfortunately being in a bag with other harder coins it had some dings but surprisingly it was in pretty good shape. It sold for 340.00 (it was 22k and under 8 grams) the rest of the coins if I recall sold pretty good too!
IN A BOWLING BALL BAG
Our Dear friend brought in some coins one day in a bowling ball bag. I will never forget it cause I said “We don’t sell bowling balls very well and that looks heavy” turns out it was full of coins.  Now it had loads of great silver dollars and 50 cent pieces and we found some great gems in it but this DIME was the very best thing in the bag and it is RARE… It’s a 1913 SCARCE Broad Leaf dime. I suggested that she go get it graded (and she took my advise) they got it graded with a ICCS rating of VF30 (Very Fine) we sold it for her for 702.01 (that is one heck of a dime to find in a bowling ball bag!)
DO YOU HAVE ANY OLD SIGNS OR TINS IN THE BARN OR GARAGE?
You know that piece of coke memorabilia with the bullet hole in it? (Or maybe it’s a different cola, beer, oil or gas sign you may have in a barn or garage) well don’t use it to patch a hole! This sold for 1325.00 and we have seen coke buttons and other large signs sell for 3000.00 and up! We had a Red Indian sign with 6 large circular rust holes in it (used as a shelf for paint cans) and it sold for 1300.00. Signs and any vintage or antique advertising pieces can be worth a whole lot of money! Do not toss them out.
THE GARAGE, BASEMENT and ATTICS are often full of value too!
Snowblowers, riding lawn mowers, even none working ones they all have value.  The snowblower above sold for 780.00 and the lawn mower sold for 580.00.  The rest of the contents of this garage got decent money too. We found an old bike, some tools, some shovels, it all adds up!

 

Feel free to ask us any questions, send us some photos if you wish, we will try to assist you as best we can. To contact us click this link:

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