A Great Tool for Researching the Market Price for Guns…
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some way to see what a gun is selling for at any give point so you can have a good idea what you’ll be paying out the door instead of having to take a guess at the price vs. MSRP? They do it with cars, after all. You can go to sites like edmunds.com and look up what people are paying for the cars at the time of sale. That gives you some great bargaining power going in to a dealership. It’s a shame you don’t have the same thing for guns so that you know what that Glock or 1911 is typically sold for.
Good news! There actually is something like that! There’s a couple of catches, however, but we’ll get to that in a moment…
There’s a little known feature of GunBroker.com that you can only stumble across if you’re registered with them and logged in at the time. So step one is to create a free account. Go ahead and take care of that, I’ll wait here. Let me know when you’re done.
All done and logged in? Great! So now, if you look at the main search bar on the front page, you’ll see a grey button that says “Advanced”. Go ahead and click on that button. Now take a look at the detailed search area. You’ll notice two tabs at the top: “Current Items” and “Completed Items”. Go ahead and click on that “Completed Items” tab.
This lets you search for auctions that have finished up. It comes down to this: If I’m selling a gun, I can ask anything I want for that gun. Granted, if I want to sell my Glock, for example, I can’t ask $100,000 for it if I actually want to sell it. Maybe if it was autographed by R. Lee Ermy or something but even then I doubt it would fetch that much. Searching through the auctions that are still pending might help you find a good deal among those auctions but you’re not going to get a good idea of what the guns will actually sell for.
By searching in the Completed Items area, you now have that research power.
A couple of tips:
- Make sure you only select the “Factory New” checkbox if you’re looking for store prices. If you’re looking for a used gun then, by all means, leave all of them checked.
- I’ll usually put $50 or $100 as the low number in the “Current Big/Price” box in order to filter out the junk auctions or the ones that didn’t sell.
- Also, make sure you select the “Firearms” category so that you don’t get 500 magazine or replacement grip sales.
So hopefully that gives you a little ammo for your market research. Go ye forth and purchase!
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