rising cost...

I follow several auctions and the prices are about same as they were two years ago except for Rock Island Auctions. RIA is an aggressive advertiser and accomplishes their prices in part from that. They have had higher sales prices than other houses for several years--especially last year.


I spoke with Ralph in 1995 about luger values--he described a price growth model based on steady increases. It might work for him but it is not an accurate description of prices on collectibles in general. Prices take occasional "jumps" then lay stable for long periods of time. That is actually a normal price pattern for most collectibles except for occasional bubbles such as in coins (80s), cars (80s), comic books (90s) that burst now and then. Guns have not jumped and burst with rare exception.


Luger prices stabilized sometime before 1994 when I started collecting them then bumped up a bit at the low end when large numbers of imports appeared around 1995. The higher quality lugers did not increase in price through the 90s.