When someone sells something for less than people think they should!

hysaf Sorry to hear your accident. Get well soon mate! Take care.

Get well soon, I have a strong dislike of motor bikes. Know a lot of friends get hurt and worse

Really sorry to hear. Fellow rider here and spent a few weeks in hospital with a few surgeries a few years back thanks to a reckless car driver. Had to learn to walk again.

Stay strong, all the best for the recovery!

hysaf Hope your fully healed very soon.

hysaf

Hope you heal soon. The downside of bikes I guess …. if something happens, usually not the biker’s fault (though there are idiots on bikes too), it tends to be much worse than in a car, something too many car drivers fail to understand.

As for what something’s worth, I agree with the “market sets the price” rationale, but it’s more complicated than even that. It also depends on the circumstances of the buyer. If the item in question is, let’s say a widget, and the “fair” price is £1800, how much will a specific buyer pay? If it’s someone struggling to find tthe money but that really wants that widget, they may have £1750 and not a penny more. Along comes buyer B, say Elon Musk or some other billionaire. £2000 is chump change to them and if they think “Y’know, I fancy a widget that colour, I don’t have a red one, only blue, green, yellow and sky-blue pink”, they may, on a whim, fork over two grand and say “keep the change”. Then put their new widget with the others they have, and promptly forget all about it. The poor git that really, REALLY wanted it got done over by circumstances utterly beyond his control, or standard market forces.

Conversely, a widget might sell regularly for that £1800 but, as it happens, everybody that wants one has one, and there just isn’t a buyer. Probably, though not necessarily, dropping the price might work. But it might not.

Most things don’t have a specific arbitrary value, and it certainly isn’t fixed over time. I have a car quite a few people seem to want, to the point that at least a few times a year I get either a knock at the door, or a note shoved through the letterbox with a “ring me if youwant to sell” message on it. Thing is, I don’t especially want to sell. Oh, I guess if someone waved a big enough price under my nose I’d sell, but I’m sure not actively looking to sell, and especially not at “market price”. Double market price? I doubt it. Triple ‘market’ price? We’re getting there.

Thing is, I bought that car new, it has low mileage, excellent condition and as such, to me, is irreplaceable as I literally cannot buy one only ever driven by me on “the market”, at any price. To me, it’s not just the car, or condition. It was my pride and joy, and means more to me that the sum of money “market price” does. I’m not wealthy, but not hard up either. I buy (within reason, I’m not talking about private jets or Caribbean islands, etc) what I want, when I want it, and it doesn’t really impact my financial situation in a dramatic way. So if that car is worth, for arguments sake, £5k and someone offers me £10k, what difference will the money make? What will it let me do that I can’t do right now, if I want to? If I could use that £10k to do something or buy something that, without selling it I can’t do, it would change te situation, but it doesn’t do that. All it means is a bit more in my bank balance, by selling something I don’t want to sell.

So what is the car “worth”? To me, more than anyone has yet offered to pay for it, so here it remains. There might, somewhere and some-when, be a person with enough money to hit my “Oh okay, I’ll sell” price, that wants the car more than whatever sum it takes to buy it. What is £10k, £25k, £100k “worth” to a billionaire?

See what I mean? It’s not just the car, bike, widget or whatever that has a market value, but the value of money depends on how much you have, compared to how much you realistically need to live your life how you want to. Even money really has no value in itself, merely in what it will buy you, or enable you to do. It’s a sort of “opportunity cost”, if you like.

I remember on the old forum people were selling big flats in excellent condition with single dosing mods and all for lower and lower prices. I think I saw Majors and Royals dropping from £400 down to £250 at one point there were so many and prices were just driven lower and lower. Even ones with coated burrs were going for £300-£350. A similar thing happened to machines - dual boilers were always over £1k but then people started shifting more and more and before you knew it the new model (4?) Expobar DBs were going for sub £700.

I was selling mine at one point without an ad. I was talking to somebody over PM and I refused to go below £750 for a machine that was at the time 4 years old with only light use. They started to send links to other sale threads for ones that had been sold previously for £600 (for a quick sale) and that were the older models or had multiple previous owners, and they topped it off with a link to one on Amazon for new for around the same price I was asking for mine - I pointed out the one on Amazon was likely the HX with the wrong description, and the previous sale threads weren’t valid comparisons. I’ve still got the machine and probably will just keep it as a spare now. No idea if the guy I was talking to tried his luck with Amazon or bought one that had been passed around by a few different owners for the sake of saving £150.

Actually, I think he did go for the one on amazon and it never arrived.

Rob1 I think I saw Majors and Royals dropping from £400 down to £250 at one point

Dead right, Rob. Years ago, picked up a doser Mazzer Major with Ti burrs that was almost brand new for £250

Another example is selling houses.

If you NEED to sell your current one to buy the one you want, or risk losing it, you may well take an offer.

But for exactly the same house, if you can finance the move without needing that sale to pay for the move, then there is far less time pressure and the seller might be more inclined to hold out for exactly the right buyer wanting exactly that house, and price accordingly, rather than pricing for a quick sale.

Even on that car I mentioned, several people said “But I can get one for £x”, but my response, put a little more delicately than this, was “Well go buy one of them, then. I didn’t even advertise this for sale. And good luck finding one of these, in this condiion, one owner, and of this mileage, which is why you knocked on my door in the first place”.

If I’m buying something, I love it when the seller is desperate to sell. It’ll drive the price down …. unless there are other buyers willing to pay more, in which case, I can walk away, and someone else can buy. It also wouldn’t be the first time a seller (of a house) waited until I’d made an offer to try to drive the price up. At that point, i walk. It can be funny to see them come rushing back when they realise a chainless cash buyer just walked away, and so did a guaranteed and easy sae. but if they pull that trick once, they’ll probably try again. Any trust has gone.

Supply and demand are usually central, but only up to a point. So often, leverage is too, and being too keen on either buying or selling doesn’t put you in a strong position.

Amberale
Think it’s going to be a write off, am still waiting for an update from insurance company.

I`m only glad I got away with just a few fractures, I was an a dual carriageway so it could’ve been a lot worse.

Is this a sign I`m old now? Not caring that much about the bike but about myself ?! How times have changed.
Remember an accident that I had in ’08 after being hit and flying over a car, I got up , bleeding and limping to the bike to check how bad the damage was !