It’s possible for collectors to make a tidy profit on LEGOs.
Collectors of the toy building blocks are seeing the demand for sets growing faster than their availability, USA Today reports. Throw in the company’s habit of only producing sets for a limited duration, and sometimes returns can exceed that of the S&P 500.
A pristine, unopened LEGO set called The Ultimate Collector’s Millenium Falcon — a reproduction of the Star Wars spaceship — now sells on the secondary market for $2,165. That’s an annualized 34% return since its release in 2007. Over that same time, the S&P has been largely flat.
Contributing to the demand is the upsurge in adult collectors and the recent expansion of LEGO-themed movies and video games. The building blocks have never seen a hotter market. One collector, Ed Maciorowski, established brickpicker.com to allow collectors to buy, sell and trade the sets online. The site also tracks how sets are selling on popular sites like Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY).
There’s always a risk in investing, though. Maciorowski says some sets, even in perfect condition, just don’t sell well and have little value for investors or collectors. Perhaps they could just build things with them.
