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Pre-Expertization Consulting Services:
Could It Be A Thing? |
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by Jay Smith
October 27, 2022
While discussing the pros and cons of various expertizing services with a valued and highly knowledgeable friend and philatelist, I almost-joked that he could have a "side gig" as a "pre-expertization consultant".
The more I have thought about it, the more useful the concept seems to me. I am wondering if such a service "could be a thing". I think it COULD be a "thing".
To be clear, I have my hands more than full and I am not seeking an additional job or role -- even if I was qualified to do it. However, there are people out there who are qualified to provide such as service, at least in regard to specific areas of philately. There may even be a very few people (though they are probably already very busy using their knowledge) who could provide such a service for much of the philatelic world.
I had also best clarify that I am talking about pre-expertization services, NOT actual expertization. While many experts have wide-ranging philatelic knowledge, extremely few people even remotely have the level of knowledge required to expertize more than a limited range of areas.
Every expertizing service, both organizations and individuals, has a variety of pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, etc. Every service has its area(s) of specialization. At the same time, there are some services that are exceptionally good in one area, but sometimes they perhaps extend farther than they should into other areas.
On top of all that, there is what strikes me as a somewhat particularly American problem: Many American philatelists tend not to be as aware of the expertizing services available in the rest of the world, to say nothing of which one is good (or best) for any particular type of material.
To get my point across, I offer a quick rhetorical quiz:
1) What do you think is the best expertizing service for valuable Australian "OS" perfins?
2) Where would you recommend sending a rare Thailand overprinted stamp for expertization?
3) To which of the many German-area expertizers (mostly located in Europe) would you send German Inflation Era stamps to have their postmarks expertized?
4) To what service would you send an early Japanese stamp of which forgeries abound?
5) If you have a U.S. stamp that you think is well enough centered that it could benefit from a "graded" certificate, based on which stamp it is, to which of the U.S. expertizing services would you send it? And are you sure that it is really well-enough centered that you would not be wasting your money for a graded certificate? And if the stamp does not achieve the target grade and thus you have instructed the service not to issue a graded certificate (you will still get and pay for an ungraded certificate), does it matter to which service you have sent it? (To the latter point, some services are well-known for graded certificates, thus a certificate from that service that is not graded might actually seem like a negative to some potential buyers of said stamp.)
6) And this question is bound to be controversial:
a) If your specific goal in getting a certificate is to protect
YOURSELF when adding a stamp to your collection, where would
you send the stamp? ... VS
b) If your specific goal is to get a certificate to increase the
marketability and potential selling price of a stamp, where
would you send the stamp?
SO, WHAT IS MEANT BY PRE-EXPERTIZATION?
What seems like a simple question is complicated by the fact that I am not aware that any such service yet exists. There are philatelic consultants that serve a single or a very few "high net worth individuals", but generally speaking, I am not aware of any service that is available to all who are willing to pay for the value that such a service could provide. A long and winding discussion ensues...
DEFINITIONS:
Philatelic expertizing is typically thought of as being the process of an unrelated third party examining philatelic items to determine genuineness, condition, and quality, including examining for alterations, repairs, defects, appropriateness of use or postmarks, etc. The result of that process is that expertizing service's OPINION. In many (most?) cases, those opinions are simply opinions and do not provide any guarantee of being a correct opinion, unless the provider has specifically made a guarantee in writing.
A certificate is the written form of the opinion and it usually includes an image. The mere fact that a stamp "has a certificate" is meaningless without knowing what the certificate actually says -- it could say that the stamp is a forgery.
Some expertizing services issue certificates for every item that they examine, even if the item is a forgery or otherwise "bad" and even if the opinion given is "no opinion".
Other expertizers only issue certificates if the item is "good"; they don't issue certificates if their opinion is that the item is a forgery, otherwise "bad", or if they are not able to render a complete opinion.
In the past, especially in Europe, but still to some limited extent today, some expertizers have marked the back of the stamp with various symbols and/or signatures, with the POSITIONING of the markings defining the expertizer's opinion. Such items are often referred to as "signed". Fortunately, in my opinion, this practice has diminished greatly because a) placing any marking on an item alters and potentially defaces it; b) sometimes the expert's opinion turns out to be wrong but yet the marking is permanent; c) sometimes markings bleed through to the front of the item, damaging it; d) any such marking can potentially be forged itself (that is a serious problem with some signed items).
[A side note: Without my consent, but apparently in line with his own policy, a prominent (now deceased) expert in Norway once marked one of my items as "Falsch" (false), right on the front of the item. He claimed that such an item could simply not be genuine. A few years later, new information came to light which proved that such an item absolutely could be genuine. However, my item was permanently scarred by his indelible marking. My points are a) Expertizers are people and people make mistakes; b) New information can change what were previously regarded as "facts"; c) Nobody should be so over-confident in their knowledge as to permanently deface an item, except in situations of absolute, well-documented certainty, such as well-known outright forgeries... but even that can be risky.]
It is important that the submitter understand under what circumstances an opinion will or will not be rendered and under what circumstances a certificate will or will not be issued. Also, it is important to know if your property will be marked in any way -- I strongly recommend that you not allow any form of marking on your item. Without some form of written certificate, telling others that expert "X" examined an item is just heresay.
TO EXPERTIZE OR NOT?
The decision to have stamps expertized, and the process to accomplish it, can be simple or quite complicated. It all depends upon your overall situation (more on that in a minute), what general type of material you wish to have expertized, and what the specific potential "patients" are.
A pre-expertization service provider would take into account all these factors, apply their knowledge of the expertization services, and potentially use their philatelic knowledge to review the stamps to make sure that they even "qualify" to be expertized.
WHO YOU ARE: ARE YOU A BUYER, ALREADY AN OWNER, OR A SELLER?
- If you are a buyer, are you in the process of buying specific items (or even a whole collection) and you want to make sure you are getting what you are paying for? Thus your goal in getting certificates is to protect yourself and your investment. In that context, the technical expertise behind the certificate may be more important than the public's perception and thus the "marketability" of a certificate. [Sometimes the best-qualified certificate is not the most well-known or marketable certificate.]
- If you are already an owner, do you want to have specific items, or perhaps entire parts of your collection, reviewed to make sure that you have what you think you have. (Hint: Many owners DON'T always have only what they think they have.)
- If you are an owner, perhaps you are not so concerned about the status of what you have, but you know that when the time eventually comes to sell your collection, you or your heirs will get a higher price if certain stamps have relatively recent certificates. But which stamps? What is the best timing (so certificates won't age-out)? What is likely to be the most "marketable" certificate for what you have?
- If you are a seller, your concerns are likely oriented toward which certificates are likely to be the most marketable for what you have and/or which will likely to result in the highest selling price?
- Also, if you are a seller or potential future seller, you may need guidance as to which parts of your holdings need to be reviewed with certificates in mind. A well-qualified pre-expertization service will likely be able to prevent you from wasting money on items that are well-known fakes or even just simple identification errors.
OTHER ‘WHO ARE YOU' FACTORS:
- Some people in all three categories (buyer, owner, seller) may have potential privacy concerns. For example, if you are a "very high net worth individual", you may not want lots of people knowing what you have or what you are collecting. Such information can cause market prices to go up. Having a person or service privately represent you in this part of your collecting process could have significant benefits to you.
- Do you have philatelic insurance? If you do not have specialized philatelic insurance it can be difficult, costly, impractical, or even ineffective, to get insurance coverage for stamps sent to overseas expertizers. Overseas Registered Mail does not provide a significant amount of insurance coverage. [Nowadays, almost universally, in the receiving country, overseas registered mail is handled as "Recorded Delivery" mail, or what we might in the U.S. call Certified Mail (which travels in the normal, unprotected mailstream).] Overseas Express Mail can provide insurance in some circumstances, but that then gets into complications with customs declarations and potential overseas customs complications and documentation issues. Furthermore, until you have some reasonable sense -- best provided by a third party that what you have is at least somewhat likely to be genuine, how does one, prior to obtaining a certificate, make and prove a postal insurance claim in case of a loss (have you ever tried to argue with the post office)? A pre-expertizing service could and should have the necessary specialized philatelic insurance to cover such overseas expertization mailings.
WHAT EXPERTIZING OPTIONS ARE AVAILABLE FOR WHAT YOU HAVE?
The type of material that you have usually defines where it should be sent for expertizing. This could be because of the qualifications of the expertizing organization or individual, or it could be because of differences in marketability of the certificates from different expertizers.
The major problem in this regard is that, unless one is a highly knowledgeable philatelist in a particular area, it is unlikely that one would even know what the range of expertizing options are. For example, I know who are at least some of the key current experts are for Iceland "I GILDI" overprints, but I have no idea who are currently regarded as the best experts for early Chinese overprints.
To my knowledge, there is no (satisfactory to me, anyway) general source for this information. It is almost as if this is "secret" information. There are essentially financial incentives for keeping quiet about such information because those who control the information have better access to the services and can thus cause items to flow through their hands. A completely different reason is that to publicly recommend some services can potentially be regarded as a shun-by-omission of those not recommended. A third reason is that, since expertizers are human and can make mistakes -- and it has been known for expertizers to either "get too old" or even in rare cases "go over to the dark side" -- there is a hesitancy, in case something goes wrong, to publicly recommend specific experts or services. There is also the simple fact that not every expert that expertizes the stamps of any given country is qualified to expertize all the stamps of that country. Thus to publish a list that just presents names and countries they expertize may not tell the whole story, sometimes with unfortunate or costly consequences.
The limited information listing expertising services (especially regarding overseas services) that one finds usually consists of lists of expertizers, without specific recommendations. Sometimes those lists are woefully out of date. Before sending anything to an expertizer that you do not know, you really must first make contact and learn about their terms & conditions, limitations of what they expertize, costs, etc.
It would take a lot of work, but a pre-expertization service could build and maintain a worldwide list of experts and thus be in a better position to offer options to their clients. Since the operator of such a service is not the expertizer, the operator cannot make any guarantees in regard to the expertizer, but the operator's experience with various expertizers (especially if recent) could be very useful information to many philatelists.
SHOULD YOUR SPECIFIC ITEM BE SENT FOR EXPERTIZATION?
I am an expertizer for many areas of Scandinavian philately. Though I do issue certificates under my own name, I am currently "on hiatus" because of lack of time and lack of enough support staff. However, for many years I have been -- and I continue to be -- one of the experts that the American Philatelic Society uses to examine Scandinavian material. There is only very meager compensation for what I do for the APS, thus I do it as part of my commitment to philatelic public service. As are result, I see a wide variety of stamps that have been submitted for expertization.
Most of the stamp that have been sent by collectors directly to me for expertization have been sent by experienced Scandinavian collectors who know how to read a stamp catalog and who usually have the correct basic identification of the item. Their concerns are usually about aspects condition, quality, alterations, defects, postmarks, varieties, etc.
One of the greatest "problems" I encounter with stamps submitted by the collecting public to a service such as provided by the American Philatelic Society is that sometimes the submitter does not have the knowledge to do the basic stamp identification (perforations, watermarks, and the like). They have seen a catalog listing or an online listing for a stamp that "looks like theirs", but is actually a listing for the rare version of the stamp with a different perforation or watermark than the stamp the submitter owns.
Unfortunately, because expertizing services have to take as much care of -- and be accountable for -- common stamps as they do rare stamps, their overhead operating costs are about the same whether a stamp is worth a penny or thousands of dollars. That is a just a reality about which little can be done. I have asked several expertizing services if they would offer a "pre-screening" service for a lower fee (and then make certificates for the stamps that deserve them), but none were able to do that because they have to track and handle every stamp as if it is a rarity.
This is where a pre-expertization service could really be helpful. The buyer/seller/owner of items could ask the pre-expertization service to pre-screen -- to the best of their ability -- stamps before they are sent on to the appropriate expertizer. Of course, there would have to be a fee for this service, probably a minimum fee per reviewed stamp plus a fee for the total amount of time involved in reviewing a group. And, very importantly, the operator of such a service can only provide their best efforts and their knowledge, all within a very limited amount of time. However, an experienced operator could probably eliminate the need for obtaining certificates for quite a few stamps that are clearly very common or are very obviously "not good" (either obvious common forgeries or obviously defective or altered in ways that are below the owner's criteria for getting a certificate).
Obviously such pre-screening would have significant limits. However, even if that pre-screening were to cost $5-10 per stamp, if it can eliminate the need for getting some $30-50 certificates (as well as, in some cases, eliminating high handling fees and postage costs, etc.), it could be a huge benefit. Furthermore, such pre-screening can probably be done days, weeks, or months more quickly than sending items off to expertizers around the world.
Pre-screening will NOT eliminate sending all "bad" items on to expertizers, but it could significantly reduce some costs for not-justified certificates. It could eliminate the need to send items to as many different expertizers for different specialty areas. Eliminating the need to send just one package to an overseas expertizer probably saves the owner a total of approximately $50 for the round-trip registered mail postage and handling costs.
COLLECTION REVIEW SERVICES:
A pre-expertizing service, could potentially also review a collection to determine which items in it need closer attention and/or need to be sent for expertization. This only applies to collections which are already confirmed to be valuable.
This level of service could be very useful to a person who has inherited a valuable collection, but who usually knows very little about stamps or how to determine if the supposedly-valuable stamps are "good". Even the long-time collector can benefit from such a service if they are getting ready to sell their collection but need help determining for which stamps certificates should first be obtained. Many (most?) valuable collections contain at least a few stamps that would greatly benefit from having certificates and thus sell at higher prices.
When a collection is sold directly to a non-specialized dealer (who may or may not have the knowledge to know if certain stamps are "good" or "bad"), the dealer cannot assume and pay for all potentially problematic stamps as if they are "good", unless those stamps already have certificates. There is a somewhat similar dynamic with collections sold through auction companies. The auction company may or may not have the available time or expertise to examine all the problematic stamps (some might suggest that it is not in auction company's immediate financial interest to look "too closely"), and they also usually do not have the weeks or months to wait for stamps to come back from an expertizer. Buyers at auctions are appropriately suspicious of high value or known-problematic stamps being offered without certificates.
Whether collections are sold directly to a dealer or through auction (where dealers are also often buyers of collections), usually the sales process cycle is much too quick for the "inconvenience" of having items expertized prior to the completion of the sale. Also, it is often a waste of a potential (retail or auction) buyer's time and energy (and sometimes money) to purchase items and then have them expertized (and then need to return items that could not receive "good" certificates). Thus a potential seller of a collection can greatly benefit from obtaining certificates in advance of the selling process because both marketability is improved and selling prices may be significantly higher.
ANCILLARY SERVICES:
An operator of a pre-expertizing service will be right in the middle of things and will have the opportunity to offer additional services to owners to help them sell their stamps, or even to buy stamps from the owners for the operator's own financial benefit (see Ethical and Moral Challenges below).
Owners of collections may be interested in getting an appraisal, either for the process of selling their collection or for estate planning, insurance, etc. The operator of such a service would be well-placed to provide such services.
Collectors who are still actively building their collections may be interested in receiving assistance in locating items needed for their collections. The operator of such a service could potentially assist in that regard.
ETHICAL AND MORAL CHALLENGES:
Various situations that may occur in operating such a service can present ethical and moral challenges.
The person considering founding a pre-expertization service will have to -- or at least they certainly should -- develop policies to avoid potential conflicts of interest in the services that they provide.
The operator will likely regularly encounter situations where they could have the opportunity to "steer" items or collections to particular potential buyers, and receive substantial fees (perhaps much more than their client is paying them) for doing so.
Because of their trusted role, there are even "darker" possibilities having to do with the operator setting up situations where the operator could substantially benefit by withholding knowledge from the owner.
There are a surprising number of both morally and ethically challenging situations that can arise from being in the service operator's role. An ethical operator will have to develop and publish policies that make it clear how they will handle various situations. This is not to say that an operator could not properly benefit from various transactions, however, such must only occur with the client's full knowledge and agreement.
YES, I THINK IT COULD BE A THING!
While such a service would only be of interest to a very limited number of clients, it would not take very many clients to completely fill an operator's work day. I think there is certainly a potential place in philately for one or a few such services to prosper and offer substantial benefits to their clients. At the same time, marketing such a service could be quite challenging because many/most potential users of such a service don't yet realize that they really need such a service!
I find this idea quite intriguing, but I must leave the possibilities to others to explore.
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