How to Find Out What an Antique Is Worth

The fastest honest way to value an antique is to find out what identical or near-identical examples have actually sold for. Search the item on eBay, then filter the results to Sold items. Asking prices tell you what hopeful sellers want. Sold prices tell you what buyers were willing to pay. Only one of those is data.

The one method that actually works

Almost every valuation question comes down to comparables. A comparable, or "comp", is a record of the same thing changing hands for real money. Everything else is opinion.

Here is the whole method on eBay. Type a description of your item into the search box, hit enter, then open the filters panel. On desktop the filters run down the left side; on mobile you tap Filter at the top. Scroll to Show only and tick Sold items. The listings that remain are completed transactions from roughly the last three months, with the price each one closed at. Sort by "Ended recently" so you are looking at the current market rather than whatever happens to rank highest.

Now read those results properly. Ignore the single highest number. Ignore the single lowest. Look at the cluster in the middle, which is where your item sits unless there is something genuinely unusual about it. If ten examples closed between $28 and $45, your piece is worth somewhere in that band, not the $400 that one listing hit because two people got into a bidding war over an unusually good example with the original box.

Check three more things on each sold comp before you count it. Is it truly the same item, or a similar-looking cousin? Did it include extras yours does not have, such as a lid, a stand, original packaging or paperwork? And what does the condition look like in the photographs? A chip, a hairline crack, a repaired handle or faded colour can cut a price by half or more, and the difference between "mint" and "used but fine" is often the entire margin.

Beyond eBay, LiveAuctioneers and Invaluable let you search past auction results across hundreds of auction houses, which matters for higher-end material that never touches eBay. Heritage Auctions publishes a large searchable archive of prices realised, free to browse, and it is excellent for coins, comics, watches and fine art. Worthpoint archives sold results going back years, though most of it sits behind a subscription. For anything you suspect is worth four figures, cross-check eBay against at least one auction archive, because the platforms serve different buyers.

Why asking prices are fiction

Anyone can list anything at any price. There is no gatekeeper. A seller can put a common 1970s ashtray on eBay at $9,000 and it will sit there for years, and every time someone searches that ashtray they will see $9,000 and conclude they are sitting on a fortune. The listing is not evidence of value. It is evidence that a person typed a number into a box.

This is the single most common reason people badly overestimate what they own. A screenshot of an active listing circulates on social media, gets written up as "this ordinary object is selling for thousands", and the claim propagates for years without anyone checking whether a sale ever happened. When you filter to sold items, that entire category of nonsense disappears.

Price guide books have a milder version of the same problem. They mix dealer asking prices with older auction results, they date quickly, and they describe the top of the market rather than the middle. Use them to identify and date a piece, which is what they are genuinely good at.

Identify the thing before you price it

You cannot find comps for an object you cannot name. Identification comes first, and it is mostly a matter of looking closely at parts of the item you normally ignore.

Turn it over. Makers' marks live on the base of ceramics and glass, on the underside of silver and pewter, on the back plate of clocks, inside the lid of boxes, and along the seam or heel of furniture components. On porcelain you are looking for a backstamp: a printed, impressed or hand-painted mark that may include a company name, a country of origin, a pattern name, a shape number and sometimes a date code. The presence of a country name is itself a dating clue for imported goods, because export marking rules changed over time; "Made in Occupied Japan", for instance, only appears on a narrow post-war window of production.

On glass, run your fingers around the body and look for mould seams. Where the seam stops tells you something about how the piece was made. Look for a pontil mark on the base, the rough or polished scar left where a blowpipe was snapped off, which indicates hand-blown rather than machine-made production. Check the weight and the ring: good lead crystal is noticeably heavier than soda-lime glass and sings when you flick it, while pressed glass thuds.

On silver, hallmarks are the whole story. British sterling carries a series of small stamped symbols covering the standard, the assay office and a date letter, and those can be decoded precisely. American silver usually just says "sterling" or "925", and anything marked EPNS, silver plate or A1 is plated base metal worth a small fraction of solid silver.

On furniture, look at the joinery. Hand-cut dovetails are slightly irregular and few in number; machine-cut dovetails are uniform and closely spaced. Circular saw marks mean post-industrial manufacture. Plywood, staples and Phillips-head screws all push the date later than people usually hope.

Photograph everything, including the marks. If a mark is illegible, search a description of it: "crown over crossed swords porcelain mark" will get you a long way. If you would rather skip the detective work, the Valued app identifies items from a photo and returns an estimated range built from comparable sales, which is a reasonable starting point before you verify it against sold listings yourself.

What actually moves the price

Four factors do most of the work, and it helps to think about them separately.

Condition is usually the biggest single lever, and people consistently underrate how much damage costs them. Chips, cracks, crazing, repairs, replaced parts, rust, woodworm, fading, missing finials and worn gilding all take real money off. In some collecting fields, an item that has been restored is worth less than the same item left honestly damaged, because collectors want originality. On furniture, stripping and refinishing an original surface can destroy most of the value of an otherwise good piece.

Rarity matters, but only rarity that collectors care about. Old is not rare. Victorian households produced staggering quantities of pressed glass, transferware and brown furniture, and most of it survives in numbers far exceeding demand. What is rare is a short-production colour, an error, a withdrawn design, a regional variant, or an ordinary object that almost never survived because it was used up.

Demand is the factor nobody plans for. Collecting markets move. Categories that commanded high prices a generation ago can be worth a fraction now simply because the collectors who wanted them aged out and younger buyers do not want the same things. Mid-century modern furniture and kitchenware have done the opposite. This is why a sold-listing search beats a twenty-year-old price guide every time.

Completeness and provenance finish the job. Original boxes, paperwork, keys, certificates, matching sets and documented history all add, sometimes substantially. A connection to a known person or event can transform an otherwise ordinary object.

When to stop researching and get a professional opinion

Most of what people find in a loft can be valued in twenty minutes of sold-listing searching. But there are signals that mean you should stop guessing and talk to someone.

Get a professional opinion if your comps cluster above roughly a thousand dollars, if you cannot find any comparable sales at all because the item appears to be genuinely uncommon, if the piece is signed by a known artist or maker, if it involves precious metal or gemstones, or if authenticity is the whole question. Auction houses will give free initial valuations in the hope of winning the consignment, which is a perfectly good way to get expert eyes on something at no cost. For a formal written appraisal, for insurance or probate, you want an accredited appraiser rather than a dealer who might also want to buy it.

One firm rule before you do anything else: do not clean, polish, repair or refinish an item you suspect is valuable. Cleaning is the most common way amateurs destroy value, and it is irreversible. This is most notorious with coins, where a polished surface can wipe out most of the premium, but it applies just as badly to patinated bronze, original furniture finishes and oxidised silver. If you want to see the principle in action, the same logic runs through the guides on old coins worth money and depression glass values.

Common questions

How recent do sold listings need to be for a valuation?

eBay's sold filter shows roughly the last ninety days, which is ideal because it reflects the market as it is now. If you find only one or two sold comps in that window, widen your search terms rather than reaching back years. For slow-moving categories where almost nothing sells in three months, auction archives are a better source, but treat results older than about two years as a rough guide rather than a current price.

My item is listed for thousands on eBay. Does that mean mine is valuable?

No. Active listings are asking prices, and there is nothing stopping a seller naming any figure they like. The test is whether anything like it has actually sold. Filter to sold items and look at what buyers paid. If nothing comparable has sold at all, the high asking price tells you nothing except that the item is hard to sell.

Should I get my item appraised before selling it?

Usually not, for ordinary household antiques. A formal appraisal costs money and is designed for insurance, estate or tax purposes rather than for setting a sale price. If sold comps put your item under a few hundred dollars, the appraisal fee eats the value. For genuinely high-value or uncertain items, a free auction house valuation is the efficient first step.

Does having the original box really make that much difference?

Often, yes, particularly for anything collectible made after about 1950. For toys, kitchenware, electronics and figurines, the box can be worth as much as the item, and for some categories more. The reason is simple: boxes were thrown away, so survivors are genuinely scarce. You can see the effect clearly when you compare sold listings for boxed and unboxed examples of the same piece, which is a pattern that shows up strongly in vintage Pyrex values.