{"id":218,"date":"2010-03-23T10:43:16","date_gmt":"2010-03-23T17:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/goldcoinsrare.com\/?p=218"},"modified":"2025-04-23T16:42:42","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T23:42:42","slug":"sight-seen-vs-sight-unseen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itmtrading.com\/blog\/sight-seen-vs-sight-unseen\/","title":{"rendered":"Sight-Seen vs. Sight-Unseen"},"content":{"rendered":"

When acquiring rare gold coins<\/a> it is important to understand the difference between sight-seen<\/a> and sight-unseen coins. If a dealer attends a coin auction and fifty 1903P $20 Liberties in MS63 are up for sale, a dealer may make a bid on those coins sight-unseen. This bid will typically be much lower per coin than if that same dealer were to be able to sit with each coin and examine them. This could be a difference of hundreds of dollars bid on each coin, even when the grade is the same on every coin.<\/p>\n

Nicer coins fetch more of a premium. If a customer wants the cheapest coins available, he or she can expect the lowest quality coins. The better the quality the more money a coin will cost. In other words, you get what you pay for.<\/p>\n

For better dated rarer issues, these coins do not trade on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis. These types of coins trade when a buyer and seller get together. A dealer will pick up that particular coin sight-seen and turn around and retail it to a customer sight-seen. This coin will fetch a higher price than a sight-unseen coin. This coin would be something that a collector would be proud to own, and that the dealer would want to buy back at a later date.<\/p>\n

Sight-unseen prices do not represent value; they represent quick-sale wholesale prices. At an auction<\/a> one might see sight-unseen bids at around $1,400 on a particular coin and yet the sight-seen bids may be in the area of $1,700-$2,000. Therefore sight-unseen bids would be taken when a dealer needs quick money. When a dealer sells nice coins they command sight-seen prices. These coins are of the highest quality and thus command the highest prices when being sold back to a dealer. When a dealer knows what he or she sold to a customer sight-seen, he or she should be willing to buy them back at the same level of quality.<\/p>\n

What is important to understand is that some companies will sell coins at sight-seen prices but then buy them back at sight-unseen prices. This could mean hundreds or even thousands of dollars based on the coin that is being sold back. Therefore, it is important to choose a dealer that will buy coins back at sight-seen prices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When acquiring rare gold coins it is important to understand the difference between sight-seen and sight-unseen coins. If a dealer attends […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":36828,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1207],"tags":[24,104,112,113],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-20-liberty","tag-rare-gold-coins","tag-sight-seen","tag-sight-unseen"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itmtrading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itmtrading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itmtrading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itmtrading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itmtrading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.itmtrading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36836,"href":"https:\/\/www.itmtrading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions\/36836"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itmtrading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itmtrading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itmtrading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itmtrading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}