Sold, sold and for sale again...

 

Antigua probably isn't everyone's favourite Fender colour. When this 1967/8 Coronado was listed on the website of Ormskirk dealer Sound Effects, back in 2022, they had a job to shift it. The price was finally hacked down to £2699. I saw it myself at this price and briefly thought about buying it to sell on. Perhaps I should have done so – when the guitar appeared again, a few months later. and at a different dealer, it was marked up to a whopping £4,499, a figure it has no chance of achieving in the current economic climate, when sales of vintage guitars are, let's be frank here, flatlining. 

It's verifiably the same instrument, from the wear pattern on the headstock, and the checking on the body. I recognised it immediately, because as a sometime collector of vintage guitars, I make it my business to know every instrument on the UK market, mainly because I don't like getting ripped off.

Today, it was back again, this time listed at Richtone in Sheffield, who've priced it £500 lower, probably in anticipation of selling it for a few hundred below that figure. Will it sell? Whoever buys it could have had it for over a grand less not that long ago, if they'd been watching the markets.

What could I, or anyone else have made on this guitar through buying it at the knock down price? Unless you're a dealer, you'd have had to sell it on through a dealer, and most of them are looking for at least 30% markup on anything they take in. So, if you sold it on to a dealer for three grand, you can add £900 on top of that to get their retail price. Had I bought it for £2699, then, I'd have made £300.

Either way, you can be sure that the current dealer gave about £3k for it, based on their asking price, which means that the previous dealer did indeed make £300. This is, of course, close to the bottom of the real vintage guitar market, which revolves around Strats, Les Pauls, 335s (of the right age) and Telecasters. Nothing else is making serious money right now, and even vintage Strats are down in real terms, with pre-CBS sunburst examples currently pegged at around £22-£25k. The big leap in prices seen immediately before and during lockdown has slowed, suggesting that prices are, for the time being, going nowhere.