Lens Resale Value Calculator

[sean_walker]

<p>I just finished a tool on my site that I'm pretty excited about: the <a href="http://www.usedcameradb.com/lenses/lensresale.php">UCDB Lens Resale Value</a> page. It lists the 20 lenses with the best resale value according to eBay over the life of my data collection (about 6 months). Sorry, it only lists EOS lenses for now because my database only consists of Canon mount lenses (currently).<br>

I also limited it to lenses that sell for over $100 used since some of the cheaper lenses gave very high resale ratings -- probably because of many kit lenses being listed as 'new' on eBay. I can relax that criterion if people are interested.<br>

Some interesting stats on the top 20:</p>

<ul>

<li>2 Tamrons, 2 Sigmas, and 18 Canons</li>

<li>7 Canon L lenses</li>

<li>9 primes, 11 zooms</li>

<li>7 EF-S lenses</li>

<li>Other than the 95% resale value of the Canon 14mm f/2.8L II (small sample size), expect a new lens to lose 10%+ of it's value right after you buy it.</li>

</ul>

<p>Anybody have suggestions for tweaking the calculations or the display?</p>

 

[angel_bocanegra]

<p>Good Job, pretty accurate. For the 24-105L, I payed 907 used in mint condition with box and all.</p>

[alan_krantz]

<p>How did you come up with $380 for the tamron 17-50 new price. The cheapest retailer wants close to $500 and the lowest price for a new sample I can find on ebay is $400.</p>

[sean_walker]

<p>Good catch, Alan. I think you've exposed some issues with my computation.<br>

The new and used prices are averaged over all lenses sold within the life of the site (I have scripts that have been collecting data since May or June). The sales for the last 60 days are on the <a href="http://www.usedcameradb.com/lenses/lensshowprice.php?lens_id=210">17-50mm f/2.8 price page</a> , but only one new sale was less than $400 in that time.<br>

The low 'new' price of the 17-50 must be from sales during the summer. It may be that the lens had an instant rebate on it during that time that pushed the price down in auctions. Does anyone remember if that is the case?<br>

Clearly, though, I should try to normalize the resale values to only compare with those in the same month or something like that to avoid price fluctuations influencing things so much. Rebates are probably the biggest culprit.</p>

[steve_lee19]

<p>What a great idea - keep it up to date and the crowds will be flocking.</p>

[JDMvW]

<p>Good on you.</p>

[derek_hofmann]

<p>How do I get to the next page of results? It's only showing 20 of the 62 results.<br>

For the averages, are you using the median or the arithmetic mean?<br>

Looking at the Live Listings of <a href="http://www.usedcameradb.com/lenses/lensshow.php?lens_id=55">this lens</a> , are you factoring in completed sales of things like lens hoods into your prices?</p>

[w_t1]

<p>Interesting stuff. I've had a few of those lenses 2-3 years, and I see the avg sale price is more than I paid for them (135f2 and 100 2.8 usm macro). I didn't see any TSE lenses, when I last looked on ebay there were a lot of the gen 1 24 shift lenses, I imagine the intro of a Mk 2 lens effects the Mk 1 model a bit. (I couln't see the entire list either, but i could see other lens resale info on the "all lens" link.</p>

<p>Nice stuff on your blog re DIY stuff, to me that is the most valuable part about the net is the info sharing like you're doing. (and the shopping lol) Tom</p>

[sean_walker]

<p>Thanks for the feedback and reinforcement!<br>

First, only showing the first 20 results is a feature -- I just wanted to do a top 20 list. Clearly that's not what other people want, so I disabled that limit. <br>

The averages are the straight arithmetic mean on all lenses in the database. In some senses a median might make more sense, or even a median in the last month. My only concern there is that many lenses won't sell in enough volume in a month to really get a good estimate. I'm open to suggestions! As it is, I suspect the TS-E lenses didn't make the resale list because they haven't sold in enough volume.<br>

Things like hoods, as-is lenses, and groups of lenses sometimes squeak into the database, but I have made scripts that automatically strip the very low or high prices along with notifying me when an eBay auction is matched to more than one lens. So, yes, there can be mistakes, but the database in general is pretty clean considering the lack of consistency in eBay keywording. Just this weekend I went through almost every lens by hand and fixed up the search terms. I'll need to do it again this weekend to get rid of some stragglers, but the searches are much better now.<br>

Another thing I've learned as time goes on is that lens prices often fluctuate quite a bit over months. For instance, this summer the Canon 90mm Macro was down near $450 with a rebate -- now I've seen it quoted at over $650 in some places! I have a lot of prices in the database for many of the Canon EOS lenses and I plan to augment the price over time graphs to show these trends. </p>

[vm1]

<p>Sean, good info out there, perhaps the first i've come across. <br>

Just one suggestion...the lens prices have increased 10-20% in the last 2-4 months, so taking an average may not be the best method, although it may still be very close.<br>

I still see the $ vs Yen sliding downwards, which may leave a bigger margin based on your average prices. See if you can take the average price grouped by latest month, which might get you more accurate prices prevailing on ebay/ keh.</p>

<p>Thanks<br>

Vinit</p>

<p> </p>

[kel_madics]

<p>Very nice info since i use ebay a lot. Can you sort them though by brand name -> focal length. pretty hard to find what im looking for</p>

[sean_walker]

<p>Vinit: I wonder why lens prices have increased in the past months -- is it a usual thing before the holidays? Either way, I'm planning to spend a little time this weekend updating things so the averages are computed for the past month (or two months) and I'll experiment with the median instead of the mean.<br>

Kel: The page I referenced is mainly designed to show resale values so the lenses are sorted by resale value. But, the <a href="http://www.usedcameradb.com/lenses/lenssearch.php">UCDB search page</a> lets you restrict the list to specific brands/focal lengths/etc and sort by a number of options like price. The search page does not list used vs new prices, but I could add it if you thought it was useful.</p>

[alan_krantz]

<p>Well you could use number of sample points as well as time to determine cut off when computing current price. It won't be that accurate when sample points are very low given that time does have an impact.</p>

<p>Prices have gone up a lot recently not sure if this is due to dollar/yen exchange rate or corporate attempt to recoup profits from reduced sales due to economy.</p>

[sean_walker]

<p>Yeah, I'm thinking of making 30 days the default time period for determining price, but if there are not enough sample points within 30 days, I'd let it go to 60 days or up to 6 months. That should give more accurate results, especially for fast-selling lenses still in production. </p>

[michael_mages]

<p>Sean, You have made a *very* cool tool. Caveat, you might want to check Ebay's terms of service, and see what they say about republishing their auction data. </p>

[sean_walker]

<p>Excellent point, Michael. Back when I originally made the site, I read their terms and it seemed like I would be ok since I was just displaying public auctions and those that would be available in the completed listings portion of eBay. Now that I'm saving price data and generating statistics, I believe I am in violation. They do have a sentence in their contract saying "You must have eBay’s express written permission..." so I'm going e-mail them this weekend and hopefully we can work something out.<br>

All I want to do is to get stats on very specific searches (camera lenses) and help inform the camera community. Yes, I am using an affiliate program, but ultimately that will be helping eBay make money.<br>

Worst case, I can stop collecting historical data from eBay and create an interface for users to enter prices they paid for lenses. It will obviously be a much more sparse database, but there could still be a lot of value in it for us, especially when coupled with tuned, live eBay searches and a large group of contributors.<br>

I'll keep you all posted!</p>

[sean_walker]

<p>After thinking about it a bit more, I plan to remove anything using historical data from public view tomorrow (Saturday). I just wanted to give warning that the links above will not be working soon.<br>

That's the right thing to do until I've talked to eBay. Hopefully they'll give me permission to continue (or continue in a limited fashion), but we'll see. </p>

[jim_mcdonald3]

<p>This is so very useful Sean and I thank you for your efforts. I'm a little nervous about buying via auctions but my curiosity and desire to expand dictate that this is the only way forward.<br>

Thank you again!</p>

[sean_walker]

<p>FYI, I've (kind of) resolved the issues with my site. eBay won't really talk to you unless you hand them a wad of cash and I'm not able to do that right now.<br>

So, I've restricted the site to data that would be available in the completed item listings and GetPriceResearch calls. Sure, the data isn't quite as comprehensive, but now I can explain my decisions to eBay if they notice me and care about what I'm doing.<br>

The good news is that the pricing information is back online, along with the resale calculator. An abbreviated version is available on the <a href="http://www.usedcameradb.com/lenses/">Lens Database splash page</a> . The full resale list is available, but hidden behind a login (just a local login that I use to prevent spam and track privileges).</p>