2021 PSA Grading Price Increases - What to do in response??

SO everyone is talking about these rumors and how PSA is increasing prices and that it’s ugly. If you really think about the sports card market as a whole, lets talk simple numbers. Right now, the average cost for sealed product is 5 times the average price of what you would have been able to find it for before all of this hype. You need to understand that in simple marketing, price is determined by supply and demand and the only reason why they are these prices today is people are actually buying these cards at these prices. So when a company like PSA automatically adds monetary value to your cards by giving it that stamp of approval of condition, of course people are gonna flock in and get their cards graded. For example, Lamelo Ball’s 2020-2021 Draft Picks Silver Prizm Raw (or ungraded) sells on average for about $130 on ebay. Now, take that card and give it a PSA 10, and now that card is valued at approximately $800. If you’re PSA and you see how much value you added and you only charge $55 for a grading service, of course you should charge more. Yes, this example is probably one of the higher end cards, but if their purpose is to shrink their backlog, then an increase of 30% is not doing anything. PSA already increased their prices twice in 2020 and despite that increase, collector’s universe’s q1 revenue for 2021 was still 50% higher than last years.  Point is, there is still no slowing down with the price increases, because even at the current rates, there is more demand than ever. Submission pricing going up was inevitable and until submissions slow down to have PSA’s backlog shrink it will continue to increase. As of today, the current turnaround times for cards are:

10 Day – 1-2 Months
20 Day - 3-4 Months
65 Day – 8-12 Months

Anyone new to grading already thinks that’s absurd, but all of this is due to such a high demand. PSA even completely stopped offering economy on their site. Simply put, the people who are submitting cards for grading are not dumb. Everyone is doing it to increase value and if the grading price isn’t less that the value it adds, then you’re not going to submit them. But right now, anyone with an old collection of sports cards will get value from grading their cards. There’s too many people who have hoards of cards before the market exploded so their cards are now worth 5 times what they were raw.  Now add grading to the mix and your seeing 10 15 20 times their initial investment. An Mbappe sticker that you could have bought directly from panini back in 2018 for 25 cents is now selling for $400 graded. Regardless, as long as the value that PSA adds to your cards is greater than what they charge for grading, people are going to continue to pay the fees and based on whats going on, I think the submission prices are still cheap. We get people with old collections coming in all the time and they’re submitting 3-4-500 cards at a time on the PSA 10 day sub and I know, they wouldn’t hesitate to spend more when half of their cards are getting over $500 dollars in added value from being graded.  That’s what were competing against and unfortunately for the new collector, price increases is going to continue because grading prices has not yet 5X’d like the retail prices have.  

So if you’re complaining about the price increases, here’s a couple of solutions. 1. you could wait until the backlog shrinks and thats when prices will decrease. 2. you could use a different grading service, but theyre backlogged as well but I will warn you, PSA grades always yield a higher return than competitors 3. Don’t submit cards that wont get a return at least the grading fees. 4. Use a service like our “Nines and Dimes” service which only submits cards we think will grade 8 or higher. Check out our site for more information.

I hope this video didn’t offend you, but to us, the price increases were logical and they will continue. until the backlog shrinks. Noone wants to wait 3 years for a return so this needed to be addressed again and will be addressed again. This is what it is.

This is Rob from filthbomb breaks, and with that Im signing off. Leave a question, comment, etc and we’ll respond. Thanks for watching.