Two listings for the same stoneware crock — one asking $180, one sold last month at $52. Only one of those numbers is real. Asking prices are wishes with photographs, sold prices are the ledger. A dealer reads the ledger.
Start where the money actually changed hands. Sold and completed sales tell you what a real buyer paid on a real day, everything else is theater. Pull a handful of them — not one, a handful — and find the cluster where most of the money lands. That cluster is the market talking. What's it saying about the piece in your hand?
Match condition before you match price. A comp with a hairline is no comp for your clean one, your chipped lid can't borrow the price of somebody's mint example. Read the photos in those sold listings the way you'd read the piece itself — rim, base, seam. Same maker, same form, same wear — then we'll talk price.
One glorious outlier is a trap wearing a crown. A single $300 sale in a field of $60s usually means two stubborn bidders, a variant you don't actually have, or a flaw the camera missed. Price off the cluster, not the miracle, the miracle already happened to somebody else. Would that number repeat next week?
Big pieces carry their own gravity. A sixty-dollar comp on a cast iron kettle means less once forty of it goes to postage, and local-pickup-only sales run cheaper because the buyer pool shrinks to a driving radius. Weigh the piece in your head before you weigh the profit. Heavy sells low far from home — that's the freight talking, not the market.
Seasons lean on prices too. Sleds wake up at first frost, garden urns stretch in spring, and a comp from the wrong month can flatter or slander a piece by a third. Check the dates on those solds. When did the money actually move?
Thin comps whisper two different stories — rare, or unwanted. Takes a steady hand to hear which one.
When the history runs thin — three sales in two years, prices all over the map — don't let hope do the translating. Sometimes thin means rare, more often it means the market yawns when this piece walks in. Rarity needs demand before it becomes a payday, a thing can be one of a kind and still sit unsold on Tuesday. Buy cheap enough that either answer leaves you whole. So — rare, or just lonely?