The Best Way to Find Out What an Antique Is Worth: Five Methods Compared

First, Decide Which Value You Need

This step gets skipped and it invalidates everything downstream. A single object has several legitimate values simultaneously. Fair market value is what a willing buyer would pay a willing seller, and it is the standard for estate and tax purposes. Insurance replacement value is what it would cost to replace the piece at retail, and it is typically the highest of the three. Liquidation or dealer offer value is what someone will hand you today, and it is typically the lowest, often dramatically so. The same chair might carry an insurance value of $3,000, a fair market value of $1,400, and a dealer offer of $500, and none of those numbers is wrong. People get upset at consignment counters because they arrived holding an insurance figure and were quoted a liquidation one. Decide which number you need before choosing a method, because some methods only produce one of them.

Method One: Completed Sold Listings

Cost nothing, and this is the correct starting point for the enormous middle of the market. The critical discipline is filtering to sold or completed rather than active listings, because active listings show what sellers hope to receive and sold listings show what buyers actually paid. That single filter separates useful research from wishful thinking. Accuracy is genuinely decent for common and mid market items where multiple recent sales exist, and it degrades fast toward the rare end where you find two comparables from three years ago. Time investment is maybe fifteen to thirty minutes per object once you know the search terms. The limitation is that you need to describe the piece correctly to search for it, so this method assumes identification is already solved, and its records skew toward the marketplace tier rather than better material sold at auction.

Method Two: Auction Records

Also largely free and covering the tier above marketplace sales. Many auction houses publish past results searchable by category and date, and those hammer prices are realized values on material that is generally better than what circulates in online marketplaces. This is where you look for signed furniture, listed artists, better silver, and anything with genuine attribution. Two things to understand when reading auction results. First, the hammer price is not what the seller received, since commission comes out, and it is not what the buyer paid either, since buyer premium goes on top, so a $1,000 hammer might mean $1,250 out of a buyer's pocket and $800 into a seller's. Second, auction results reflect that specific sale, meaning venue, timing, and who happened to be in the room, so a single result is a data point rather than a value. Accuracy is high with several comparables and unreliable with one.

Method Three: Subscription Price Databases

Paid research access, with the major option covering more than 610 million records and roughly a billion photographs dating to 2006, at subscription tiers running roughly $28.99 to $46.99 monthly and an annual plan near $449.99. What you get is depth and speed: two decades of realized records in one search rather than piecing together free sources. For anyone valuing objects regularly, a dealer, reseller, or estate professional, that time saving justifies the cost quickly. For someone with a handful of pieces, it usually does not, and the free methods above answer the same questions with more effort and no money. The same assumption applies as with sold listings: the database needs you to know what you are searching for. Depth of archive does nothing for an unidentified object, which is the situation most casual users are actually in.

Method Four: Photo Based Appraisal Apps

The fastest path, and the only method that starts before identification. You photograph the object and get back an identification and a value estimate in a minute or two, without needing to know the maker, the pattern, or the period first. Valued does this: snap a photo and it identifies the maker and era where determinable, points out the authentication details worth checking, and gives an approximate market value based on comparable sales rather than on active asking prices. It covers furniture, pottery, glassware, silver, paintings, jewelry, and collectibles. Accuracy is good on identifiable categories with reasonable comparable volume and necessarily wider on rare or unusual material where comparables thin out. The shared limitation of every photo based method: condition cannot be assessed from an image, and a replaced foot, a filled crack, or a later refinish can move value more than the attribution does.

Method Five: Professional Appraisal

The most expensive and the only one that produces a defensible document. A credentialed appraiser physically examines the piece, assesses condition properly, researches comparables with professional judgment, and issues a written appraisal stating which type of value it represents. Cost varies widely by market and scope, and it is charged by hour or by project rather than as a percentage of value, which is worth knowing since percentage based fees are a conflict of interest and a warning sign. This is the correct and sometimes required method in four situations: insurance scheduling, estate settlement and tax filing, equitable division among heirs, and donation deductions. It is also the right call any time an object might be genuinely significant, because the cost of a professional opinion is small next to selling a valuable piece for a fraction of its worth on the strength of a phone estimate.

Matching the Method to the Situation

Sorting an inherited household: photograph everything with an appraisal app for triage, which separates the ordinary from the possibly significant fast, then research the flagged items in sold listings and auction records, then hire a professional for the two or three pieces that survive both filters. Deciding whether to keep or donate something: free sold listings alone are sufficient. Pricing inventory as a reseller: a database subscription pays for itself in time saved. Insuring a collection or settling an estate: professional appraisal, no substitutes, since insurers and tax authorities have requirements that estimates do not satisfy. Curious about a single object: an app or twenty minutes of free searching. The general rule that saves the most money and grief: use free and fast methods to triage, and spend professional money only on the small number of pieces where being wrong would actually cost you something.

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