The Wealthy Barber Podcast - #56 — Daniel Glazier: Appraisals & How to Avoid Family Conflict Over Your Estate

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

Our guest this episode is Daniel Glazier — a Certified Personal Property Appraiser (CPPA) with more than 25 years in the designation. Daniel spent decades in the used furniture and antiques trade before moving into appraisals full-time and has now completed over 1,000 appraisal reports for families, executors, lawyers and financial institutions across Southern Ontario. In this episode, Dave and Daniel dive into the often-overlooked world of personal property appraisals and why so many family fights after a death have nothing to do with money and everything to do with stuff. They cover the endowment effect, Daniel's "VHS system" for identifying the items most likely to cause conflict, how to resolve disputes over contested belongings and why making a plan ahead of time is one of the most important and overlooked parts of estate planning. Whether you're working on your own estate plan, helping a parent downsize or settling an estate as an executor, this episode is packed with practical insights that could save your family real money and a lot of unnecessary conflict.   Show Notes (00:00) Intro & Disclaimer (01:44) Intro to Daniel Glazier (03:42) Daniel's Origin Story: Used Furniture & Strip Joints (06:06) The Endowment Effect & The Used Furniture Market (07:53) The VHS System for Identifying Items That Could Cause Family Conflict (11:16) Resolving Conflicts Over Contested Items by Selling Them (13:26) Make a Plan Ahead of Time to Avoid Family Conflict (16:15) The Research on Sentimental Items (17:34) A Solution to the Wedding Ring Dilemma (18:52) Handling Non-Monetary Heirlooms (20:50) The Appraiser's Role in Estate Planning (23:24) The $5,000 Lamp Nobody Noticed (25:22) Will AI Replace Personal Property Appraisers? (26:55) Getting the Appraiser Involved Early (28:02) How Clients Find Daniel (29:41) Why Sold Prices Beat Asking Prices (31:10) Location & Charitable Auctions Skewing Values (33:11) Conclusion

Hey, it's Dave Chilton, the wealthy barber and former Dragon on Dragon's Dent. Welcome to the Wealthy Barber podcast. Well, we'll be hosting some of the top minds in the world of personal finance. Yes, that's to balance me out. The podcast is about making this subject not just easy to understand, but dare I say, even fun, honest. Whether you're trying to fund your retirement, figure out how to build a down payment, save for your kids' education, manage debts, whatever, will be here to help you.

You do it. Before we jump in, a quick but important note, nothing we discuss here should be taken as investment advice. We don't know you and your personal financial situation. So we're not here to tell you we're specifically to put your investment dollars. We're here to educate, get you thinking, and we hold entertained. But please do your own research and or consult with your financial advisor before taking any action. Hey, it's Dave Chilton, the wealthy barber with the wealthy Barbara podcast, going to do a little bragging before we launch into it. Holy smokes is the podcast hot. Who would have believed that a Canadian-only personal finance podcast is hot?

But we're number two oftentimes on the Apple Business podcast, the number one Canadian podcast. Everywhere I go, people come up and talk about the podcast, not me, unfortunately, but the quality of the guests and how much they're learning, listening to them. These really are strong episodes. In fact, it's interesting. I think all of this has turned out better. that are our highest expectations when we launched it, and it's because of the guests.

They've been absolutely wonderful. Keep listening, tell others about it. It's free. There's no advertising. We're not trying to sell you anything. We just want to give back and help people to manage their money better. Along that line, we have a very interesting guest today, a little different. A subject near and dear my heart, that's why he's here.

Daniel Glazer. Daniel has one of the more unusual credentials. you'll ever hear. In fact, I had not heard it before. He is a certified private property appraiser. What does that mean? Well, we'll get more to that in a moment, but why did I want him to come on? It's because I've been doing a lot of estate planning videos, learning a lot in that field, helping some people, learning from a lot of others. And I cannot believe how much conflict you see within families around personal property. Often property doesn't have that much marketplace value. It's sentimental value and how families have traditionally not dealt with that very well. In fact, I've said in a

couple of videos that that's been the biggest hotspot that I see. It's not the big picture stuff. It's not the complicated trust, et cetera. It's personal property. Daniel deals with that for a living and deals with it well. His TED talk has been exceptionally well received. He's come up with systematic approaches to this. Wonderful guy to have on the show. Welcome. Thank you so much, Dave. I feel very honored.

And I actually feel very honored that you're talking about this and have me on because it's probably the least talked about thing when it comes to estate planning. And probably the biggest problems are the stuff. So I really, really appreciate it. You've nailed it. I mean, they really are. You know what's funny is five, six, seven years ago when I started doing all the research to create videos and stay planning. I had no idea how big a problem, personal property and fights over

who is going to get it. I had no idea. Like I thought, okay, there's some minor family squabbles. But then when you start talking to executors, you start talking to family members of the deceased, that's been what's led to the friction. The family divides. This is such a weird area for, by the way, somebody to find themselves in. What got you into this? What was your path? It literally started when I was 12 years old. And I know it sounds crazy. I'm 57, so I'm not a not a spring chicken. But my grandma opened up a used furniture store on Danforth Avenue in 1981. Ended up being my summer jobs. That's what I ended up doing is driving trucks as I got older, doing the deliveries. And then in 1998, I'm glad you added as I got older. I mean, if you're

driving the trucks at 12, I would have been a little, a little put off by that. I had my license one day and I was doing deliveries in a cube van full of stuff, like driving down major roads in Toronto, but family business, right? But in 98, my sister and I took it over and we changed it to. HDTV started coming into and then it was cool to buy used furniture. We got a website early. We marketed. We did really well.

We ended up buying a strip joint across the street that was 14,000 square feet and 50 parking spots because our business expanded so much. And I did all the buying, selling and appraising, and then the appraising part of it. Wait a minute. Let's expand on strip joint. Do you mean strip mall or what do you mean by that? A real strip joint.

It was across the street. And you bought a strip club, a strippers club. We bought a strippers club. The ironic thing is the license comes with it. And we weren't sure what we were going to do because we had to figure out the cash flow and stuff. Do we keep it open for a little while? My wife's like,

You're divorced if you think you're going to run a strip choice. But yeah, so 14,000 square feet. We used to do a truck load every day buying and selling. And I did all the buying for it. That's how I learned how to do it. But I dealt with a lot of estates. And lawyers would say, could you give me a report? And then finally it was like, you need to be a certified appraiser.

I figured it out. I did with the Canadian personal property appraisers group, got certified 2000. So it's over 25 years. I've been a certified appraiser. So that's a bit of a long story. but that's the story. No, great story. And please tell your wife, I'm fully supportive of the strategy that she put into play.

When you said it's ironic, I thought you said it's erotic. And I was going to say, I do not like where this is going. This could be our first X-rated podcast. So even though that is an unusual story, it's a very appropriate one for what you ended up doing. I mean, you were dealing with the states. You were dealing with grieving people oftentimes and executors. You were seeing a lot of the very same things that I referred to earlier. And it put you in a good position to understand sentimental value, market value, how they combine.

I mean, you must have seen some people have very unrealistic feels for what their property was worth. When you're dealing with the contents, you're dealing with the stuff, there's a word for it. It's called endowment, the endowment effect. And it's where people, because they have a personal attachment to it, they think it's worth a lot more than it is. I'm running into this a lot with seniors where they paid a lot of money. And I could tell it's beautiful Giverd furniture, solid mahogany. They probably bought a table with four chairs and then every paycheck added a chair, later bought the buffet and hatch.

Like all this. And it wasn't cheap. A lot of times they bought it at Eaton's fine homes. But it's the stuff, now it's $50, $100. I'm always fall. I don't have a store anymore. We closed down in 2016, but I'm constantly involved following. What are things selling for?

And it's going this way. It's not going this way. Like people keep saying, this stuff's going to come back. I'm like, I hope it does for just because of the quality end of it. But it's people hire me to just go sit and talk to their parents. Right. I'll do like a consultation. We'll walk through.

I get it. And I'll talk to them. And they'll listen to me because I also understand like I again, I said I've been here doing it says I was 12 years old. So I remember when we did get $1,500,000 for a used dining suite. That's now going for $50, right? It is. the whole used business has changed. In fact, look at how many people do all their shopping off Facebook marketplace for these types of things and get them at close to zero. I have friends who do that

and so the value is way down. So you're running into these people and you're doing these appraisals, but as you're dealing with the actual families and you're getting involved prior to death and you're consulting with them, you're walking them through a system. A lot of times there's huge sentimental value associated with certain items and a lot of those same items are coveted by more than one family member. How do you instruct them to work through all of this, to assign values when you've got, again, memories playing a role, emotions playing a role? How do you walk through that minefield? I saw there was a problem. And I was like, okay, what are the problem items? Because at any given house, there's thousands of thousands of items. But it comes down to 10, 20, 30 items,

But what are those items? So I came up with a system and I call it the VHS system. It's the most valuable items, your family heirlooms and the sentimental items. And the most valuable, it's obvious because of the money. Like if you have a painting worth $10,000, of course, oh, we want that painting. They don't want it because it's a family heirloom. They want it because it's worth $10,000. Let's be realistic.

So the valuable stuff is definitely you got to list the most valuable stuff. And the family heirlooms, that's usually the person that it's been passed down. there's some kind of family history attached to it. The sentimental items, what's hard about sentimental items is we don't always know what's sentimental because we have things that are sentimental to us, but something else might be sentimental that we think we're going to throw out or no one's going to care about. And those are the items we have to identify because those are the items that can cause a lot of the problems in a family.

So that's the VHS system. It's a system where you organize, where you inventory all these items, and then you make a list, and then you really look through the list. And then you narrow it down once you realize, you know, maybe that isn't that valuable. That family heirloom, I could tell no one's going to want it. The sentimental items. But when you get to the sentimental items, you really have to have conversations with your family. You really do.

You know, and you get to be something as simple as what items do I have? I'm thinking a good way to put this. I read this yesterday is to say, I'm thinking of downsizing all my stuff. Is there anything here that you would like? And it could be very surprising when it's a pen. and maybe you signed report cards with. It could be very basic things. But it's important to identify those things

because I've seen it. You hear it. You hear the stories. I actually see it. I'm in the trenches where people are fighting over. There's no value. There's no monetary value in a lot of these things. But it could be an old rocking chair.

There was a friend of mine was involved in an estate. A brother and a sister were fighting over the rocking chair. And then it went to mediation. And they each get it for six months. He lives on BC. She's an untie. No. I swear. I swear. Oh, the shipping would kill you. And do they actually follow that and ship it back and forth?

I've lost where that went. It was just like someone said, oh my God, I was just talking to my lawyer. And so it wasn't something I was involved, but a good friend of mine that's a professional organizer. And I have no idea, but you know what a wooden rocking chair is worth? $25 these things, right? That's the truth. $50, maybe? No, it's crazy. I like the VH.I. approach. I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I have a VHS. Very few people can still say they watch VHS. But no, and it's not worth anything along the same line. But I mean, that's a great system to organize things. But at the end of the day, it doesn't avoid some of the conflict. So let's say we have a very sentimental item. It's an ashtray collection that my grandmother

had and you've got multiple grandkids who all associated with her and want it. They think it's pretty. They like the whole shebang. And they're arguing over it. any tips on how best to resolve those types of conflicts? Are you taught like after it's in a state and they're actually in, they're arguing after someone's passed on? Or even beforehand, let's say the parent or the person that's about to pass on is said, look, let's chat this through and they're trying to stay calm and they're trying to do all the right things around conversations.

But there's still conflict because different people associate different value with this or you have an item that can't be divided in any kind of way at all. How do you deal with those types of things? Do you go to a lottery system where you have a random draw? Like, what do you do to take away the kind of pain and the kind of anger that can result from all of this? You have to sell it or you have to give it away. Like, it just can't be part of it. That's the whole reason, like when I talk about the VHS system is we're eliminating the items that are going to cause the most problems.

That's the whole point of it. When I mean eliminating, we don't have to get rid of everything, sell everything. You really have to identify the ones that are going to cause the most problems. And my advice is sell them, donate them or give them away. don't let it get to the point where it's in your estate because I've seen it. To me, every family is like a little campfire, right? And then as more people are added to the family, the fire gets bigger and bigger and bigger. When you're dealing with an estate, it's like this bombfire.

And we have to take logs out or make sure there's less logs going in. Because that bonfire, if it turns into a forest fire, then it's out of control. Families break up over this stuff. That's what's near and dear to my heart is people, you know, Yeah, they're breaking up over stuff. I'm an hours guy. So I'll sit there in a house in Toronto. Say it's Rosedale.

There's a three, four million dollar house. And they're fighting over a few hundred dollars worth of stuff. And I'm like, the lawyers are going to get involved. You're going to not talk. It's just not worth it. So that's my advice. If you've identified which items can cause the problems, let's deal with them while we're alive. We're going to make the decision on it, not leave it up to our family.

Yeah, that's interesting. So, I mean, one of the big piece of advice that you've given, in TED talk as well is let's address this prior to death. Yeah. Let's address this prior to any dementia or kind of cognitive decline. When everybody's on their A game, let's get the potential inheritors together. Let's talk it through. There's less emotion at that time because this is still a ways off.

People tend to be calmer. And to your point, you can discover the potential areas of conflict and then figure out the right path to deal with them. Now, I agree with you that in many instances, getting rid of them may be one of the better options, but it's never too well received from people. They are always saying, why would we get rid of something that we all have sentimental thoughts towards and that we're arguing over who should control, but we don't want, again, this to be out there. Do you come back again and go back to what I referenced earlier? Do you ever have a lottery system where they draw and they put their name on different things

and they go through the house that way? I've seen that more and more often lately. The lottery system is for the stuff that isn't the VHS system, right? Because there's thousands, hundreds of items in a house, right? thousands. The VHS system, this is very specific because we're down to 10, 20, 30 items. We're not talking hundreds of items. So you have to make a plan for those. Even if you're saying Mary's getting it and not Jane. And because Mary might be mad at you, but at least she's not mad at Jane. To me, this is about preserving the family. That's actually really important. And you make the decision. I'd rather my children

were mad at me, but not mad at each other because I want the family legacy to keep going. on and on. Branches and trees break off during this process, right? Where brothers, family, they never talk again. And it's literally, it's over stuff. There's emotions attached to this stuff. Like, if we get down to it, like, why is someone fighting over, you know, a $25 rocking chair? Well, there's some kind of emotions attached to it. And there's some kind of trauma. There's something attached to that that's more than monetary. And I think that's why, too. And when we're dealing with the states, people focus a lot on the monetary end of. it, but you can divide money up. You can't divide a rocking chair up. Do you see that time sharing

idea that you advanced earlier very often now? So it's something that has sentimental value. They don't want to get rid of it. So someone takes it for X months and someone takes it for X months and it passes around the family that way? That's the only instance where I heard it like really heard it that way. Cottages, which I've heard you many times talk about cottages. I'm from a family of We're cottages. We grew up in cottages, odd cottages. I've made the mistake of a bit of a fractional ownership in a family cottage. I get the cottage end of it.

But the rocky, that's just an extreme story. And I guess it's just me because I've been around things my whole life is you've got to somehow take the emotions out of it. That's why do the VHS system. You make the decision. Don't let your family make the decision. I want to give our listeners some comfort on something that is interesting. Some of the research is sowing that when you do get rid of a sentimental item, that you're very upset, that your brothers, your sisters, the family is forced to get rid of, often you get over it quite quickly. Now, you don't necessarily get over the conflict quite quickly, but you get over the missing item quite quickly.

And if you keep that in mind, it often helps to get through all of this. but to your point, that's not as easy to do as it is for Dave Chilton to talk about. And it's interesting, you said earlier, when it's done beforehand, you would rather they're mad at you, the parent, the grandparent, whomever it is that's leaving the money, but you don't want them mad at the sibling. The problem is, in real life, even if the sibling had nothing to do with where it ended up, they tend to take it out on the sibling to some extent. It's not about the sentimental item.

It's about the memories. That's what it's about. It's about the history. It's what it represents, good, bad, whatever, trauma, happiness. It's not about the actual item itself. And I think you said that well, and that's why it aligns with some of that research that says, you don't lose those memories. And therefore, you do tend to get past the object moving on a little bit more quicker than some people anticipate.

Where I've seen this jump up, of course, is often there's only one wedding ring. Some bandwidth is three and four, but often there's only one wedding ring. And a number of the people in the family can attach great sentiments of events. value to that and wanted for one of their kids, their crayon kids, et cetera. And there tends to be some conflict no matter where it ends up. How have you handled the wedding ring dilemma in the past? Jewelry is a funny thing because often we find a lot of value in the jewelry. People didn't think people had much value. So there's always some kind of neat secrets somewhere. I was just thinking about this. And what I have seen in the past, where they've taken the ring and then they've

taken it to a jeweler and they made other jewelry out of it. And I think, That's a much better way. Our family did that. Made the ring into two rings. Yes. Love it. That would be my advice there. Instead of selling it and people upset, that's a family heirloom and that's a sentimental

item and that's a valuable item. That's a ding, ding, ding when something's on all three of that list. That would be my advice there is make some more jewelry out of it. Yeah, that's great advice. And I've seen that more and more. As I say, we did it in one instance. It was made into other jewelry. That was a perfect resolution to the whole thing.

And again, jewelers are very talented of figuring all the creative ways to get at this and still have it very attractive. And I think that's a really good idea. What about things like grandma has left diaries? And the diaries capture what her youth was like. Everybody's read through them. They've made us all closer to her. We don't want to give them up. They certainly have no resale value.

But a number of the people in the family want them. Do you ever kind of break with what you said earlier on the VHS approach? and then go to a lottery or go to a bidding system or something along that line? Or is that something you think, okay, this could be the rocking chair. Let's share it every three months. We'll move it to another family member. That's personal to me because my grandmother, she had these amazing memoirs and none of us know where they are. Like my mom is from a big family and we love the family history.

And plus my grandma was a Wallace and she keeps saying that we're related to William Wallace. And she told us that before the movie Braveheart came out and that I was. after we were like, Grandma, there was a movie about this. She's like, oh, that's so sweet. You should have got in free. I would have loved to read her memoirs and they lived through the Depression and there was these amazing stories and they're gone. If you think about that, I'd have no problem sharing it with my cousins and something

like that in that instance, because that's something that needs to stay in the family and be protected for sure. Yeah, and you can make electronic versions of things like that now that aren't quite the same, but they still are meaningful. And you've got the actual memories. You've got the writing. stored electronically and everybody can have a copy or you can share. A lot of this goes back to what you said earlier.

If you can discuss all of this early in the process, when people are calm, they're not grieving, they're not emotional yet. It helps so much waiting until the death has actually taken place. And then everybody's fired up and you've got people on edge anyway and one of the executives is overwhelmed and there's grief there. That is not the prudent approach. I agree. I agree.

And that's, that was just me sitting there. years and years and years of this saying there's got to be a better way and why aren't people talking about this ahead of time. I really think an appraiser needs to be part of an estate planning too and I don't mean it in because I'm an appraiser. I mean any appraiser, right? Because we'll get to the valuable stuff is we need to know is it valuable or not valuable and do people want it. The role in appraiser after an estate is to go in and just evaluate all the main assets and then come up with a value for CRA and for distributions. But prior to it, with the estate planning, you're inventorying all the, you're doing the difficult work ahead

of time to save your family the grief after. Yeah. And you need an appraiser. It's no different than finances. You can't just say, I'm going to decide to buy this stock and that stock and this stock without some kind of financial knowledge or a financial planner. You need to make decisions based on values because it's important. The value is important, but also the research of what actually things are, what you have. I've seen where people think they have these things worth a ton of money and I've seen where I've been in a house and I'm looking in a corner and going, you know, I think that floor lamp's worth about $5,000. They're like, what? That thing, we were going to put it out for scrap.

So, yeah, the appraiser is very important in the estate planning and has been left out. And I'm not just saying that because I'm an appraiser. I just, I see it. That all makes sense. I've got a funny story about this that you'll get a kick out of us. So when my grandmother died, she left three paintings to my father. And their walls were full. and he said, I'm going to give one of these to your sister, and I'm going to give one of these to you.

Great. So put it up on the wall of my house. I come back from a tour a few weeks later. It's gone. It's out of my house. Yeah. I, is it stolen? I phoned my father.

So did you come get that painting? He said, yeah, he did. He said, I ended up sending photographs of it to an appraiser. And it turns out the one that I gave you was worth a lot of money. So I took it back and sold it. And I said, are you giving me any of the money? And so that was the end of that deal. I mean, he discovered he thought it was useless and now he thinks it's worth a lot of

the, yeah, that's all gone and my wall is blank again. So he really figured it out, yeah. But again, I think you're right. It's when in the process do we do a lot of this? And to your point, and I mean, it comes across a self-serving, but I totally support you. The earlier in the process that you get the appraiser involved for some of these bigger items, the better, because again, to your point, it helps the decision process.

What we're looking for here is two things. fairness and avoiding family conflict. The more knowledge we have about the value of these things, the more likely we are to be able to deal with both of those things perfectly. So that makes a lot of sense. And I think it's a good idea. If you've seen any extreme stories about things that people didn't realize worth a lot of money and ended up being very valuable indeed?

Well, I actually going to go back to this LAMP story because it was kind of wild. A guy called and he said, I have to deal with my brother's estate. And I just need, he doesn't have anything worth any money. And we just got to do it. for CRA and the lawyer wants it done. So I said, I go over there and it's just a little wartime bungalow. And they're already putting scrap and stuff out to the curve and stuff. And then I go in and they used to own bars.

So there was some cool memorabilia stuff that had value. But like none of the furniture or anything did. But there was this funky lamp in a corner that I could barely see and taking a bunch of pictures. And it's, but something, as an appraiser, you've been doing this for years, things just go ding, ding, ding, deep in the rain man brain. Yeah, they click. Yeah, and I go back and I'm doing the appraisal. And then I start researching this lamp.

And I go, okay, this could be quite valuable. So I called him because he wasn't far. And I go, you're still around? I go, I want to come look at that lamp. And I go, look at it's an original. Yeah, it was minimal a $5,000 lamp. And he had bought it for his brother in Florida at one of those massive flea markets they have, I think for $10 or something.

Right. And his brother liked weird stuff. So he brought it back to him from Florida. It was supposed to go out in the scrap. And it was the most, it was worth more than the whole estate. So it's, it's that, that one sticks. I'll give you another one that just happened. I was just doing an appraisal last week and I'm going through the house and they pointed out a few pieces that were valuable.

But then I went into the kitchen and I always opened a cupboard to see if there's anything. There's sometimes there's China in there and stuff. And in a food cover, there was a flatware box. I opened it up and it said community plate, which, I'm like, okay, it's probably plate. Turn it over. It says Burke Sterling. So I got to go get my scale.

I sit down, inventory weigh it, $4,060 in a food cupboard. Wow. Are you going to be competing with the large language model soon because people are going to start taking photographs of all of this and feeding it into the LLMs and getting back reasonably accurate appraisals? I hate to be a downer. No, no. But are you worried about that at all hitting your career? You know, you think about it like hitting us all. I was at a big networking event and there's a crazy AI guy and I could tell he was analyzing who's not have a job here in five years.

I could just tell what he was doing. He said, I can't be replaced. So I liked that from a guru of AI. I'm going to take an example. You go up to a painting. You take a picture of a painting and it's an oil. It will tell you this painting is by so and so something. And it is not accurate because you can't read the signatures.

Right. You don't know if it's a lot of it is feel, touch, smell. If I walk into a house and there's been chain smoking there forever, but it's full of good furniture, it's not worth much just because the cost of cleaning it is way too much than what it's worth for sure. So maybe one day, I run into this all the time. I had a friend yesterday text me. My dad's got this antique desk and he sends me a screenshot that is worth $4,000. I go, I sent him a screenshot for one that sold at an auction for $90.

You know, it's funny you bring that example up. We had the exact same thing happen with a tall clock. Yes. And the exact same thing. Where, you know, somebody at an LLM and then somebody else said, that's worth thousands and it was worth, you know, 300. Yeah. And again, you can get numbers that are way off and they don't keep up necessarily to the current marketplace. Just going back to something I want to clarify for the listeners, your argument is that you should get involved in this process a lot earlier than you do.

that too often you're brought in when the estate's being settled as opposed to earlier when it's being planned. Is that not what you're saying? Yeah, I do. There's two hats here. The estate planning is to come in. And this is to help you legitimately do a great estate plan, right? Because we're doing estate planning because we want our families to inherit our wealth. But we also want the legacy to go on.

And you're doing a lot of the hard legwork. So your family's not having to do it. And especially the executor. It just makes it nice and easy. We've identified the 1030 items. When I'm doing for an estate, I'm doing the whole household. I'm doing a lot of the stuff that doesn't have a lot of value, but we're just including it just for the CRA and so for distribution.

So we know what the fair market values is. The estate planning is a very different thing. The estate planning is just making sure that we have a plan for our stuff so it's not going to mess up our family. You need values. You need values and you need to know what this. things really are. How do your clients typically find you? Well, I've been doing it a long time for 25 years. So there's a lot of word of mouth, a lot of estate lawyers. I deal with some of the trust companies. I love referral, still referral. Like Google, I put Google out there. I still love

referrals. I'll also do difficult estates. So I'm a generalist too, where I won't just do the artwork. I won't just do collectibles or just furniture antiques. That's what I love actually about my job. And my background of buying and selling whole households and estates, Going back years and years, I have to be able to walk in a house and figure out what everything is and also figure out what the value is. So there's not a lot of us that are actually generalists. There's lots of specialists. And if I don't know something, I love it, because now I become a specialist in that. It could be a farm and I have to deal with a farm equipment.

Personal property is anything that's not real estate. So you're doing all the antiques and stuff in a farmhouse. That's right. If there's a big shop, if there's machinery, snowmobiles, motorcycles, like, personal property. property is anything that you have that is not real estate. I did one in North York and we go in the basement and there's a machine shop in the basement. The whole basement was a machine shop. He was a machinist for one of the hospitals and he'd made his whole basement a machine shop. So I learned about lays and I learned about all these different tools. And so do you do all that research on your

own or in some instances do you turn to an outside specialist who focuses all his or her attention there? Sometimes you do have to deal with a specialist for sure. My job is to figure out the market value of something, right? Like, that's my job in doing the research. And sometimes the research is dealing with a specialist for sure. You know, I find with collectibles, it's interesting because I've spent a lot of time in that space. And a lot of the public thinks theirs are worth way more than they are. And it's especially true because they see what one has gone for in a retail environment.

But of course, the person you're selling it to, the other collector or the person who's going to retail it, they're going to pay you half of that, if that. and so often they think that their stuff is worth way more than it really is in the marketplace. Yeah. I run into, when you say like AI and different things, I run into a lot where AI will give selling prices usually because it's scouting the, you know, the internet and they're like, this is selling for this. I deal in. Exactly.

I want to know what it's sold for. That's for me, like, it's an unbiased professional opinion of value. And I use a lot of different websites because there's great descriptions and stuff. especially if they've overvalued something that they're trying to sell. That's great for me figuring out what it is and the descriptions and stuff. But when it comes down to a value, I want to know what it's sold for. That's when we're dealing within a state, fair market value. What did it sell for?

Not what someone's asking for it. Yeah, what they ask for. It's not relevant. What did it sell for? But even then, I would argue, as I said, that probably overstates the value because just because that's what they sold it for often in a retail environment. Yeah. You couldn't sell it for that when you were selling it to them,

for example. And so even that can overstate the value. Sometimes you've got to do a comparative analysis. So you'd look at what the highest cell for, what did the lowest sell for, and then you figure out what the value is. It's also in this day and age where the world's global, when we're doing values for an estate,

it's where the estate is located. That's a very important thing. If somebody's selling a piece of mid-century furniture, but they're in Greenwich Village in New York, it's going to be a lot higher than it would be down at a vintage shop in Scarborough. You have to understand where are those values coming from, too.

I run into this art where I'll come across a piece and say the pieces are all going for $1,500, $2,000 and all of a sudden like $10,000. And I'm looking and they're like, okay, why are they so inflated? I dig deeper into the auction and I find out it was like a charitable auction, right? People are purposely overbidding because they're doing it to donate to charity. Done it many times. Yeah, you actually numbered prints, all these Bateman prints, everybody. That is it. They paid crazy thousands of dollars for and stuff. You know, just things like that. Numbered prints, that's a, that's another thing where I run into all the time. That was a big thing in the 80s, 90s and the early 2000s by a number one.

Huge. 80s, early 90s, that was jake. And you're right. At charity events, you saw them all over, usually signed by somebody. Not just the artist, but say an athlete or whatever. Yeah. But there was so many of them that they didn't really have the value that people perceived them to have. I always have this thing with someone goes, it's a numbered print. I'm like, you have 780 of 11152. So there's another 1,150. And I'll say maybe 10 or destroyed. So there's 1100 or so out there. And they're like, yeah, that's a good point. Right. Everything comes down.

It's economics, right? Supply and demand. When you talk about why is furniture going for so cheap and stuff, there's a lot of it out there, less buyers, right? It's just economics 101. No, it's true. It's funny. When the new, the young people went to buying all new,

didn't want to buy a lot of the used in the antique. again, the demand side fell dramatically at the same time as the boomers and parents were aging out and the supply went up. And of course, we've seen exactly what happens in that marketplace. So listen, enjoyed very much having you on. And where are you right now, by the way? I'm sure our listeners want to know. Oh, so I'm in the, I'm in the Scarborough Bluffs in Toronto. I'm in the east end of Toronto. I'm in the most beautiful part of Toronto, the Scarborough Bluffs. Thank you so much for finding the time to come on, continued success with your business. Oh, thank you so much, Dave.

This was an honor. I'm a big fan. I'll tell you a quick little story leaving. We have all three of your books here. And I didn't even know. We have the wealthy barber, which is upstairs on a bookshelf. And then we bought your latest one. I was a fan reading it.

And then I go to put it on my bookshelf. And I have the wealthy barber returns on there. And someone referred me to your book back in the 80s. So I guess the first one was in the late 80s, I believe. But I really do appreciate this. Thank you so much. No, it's my pleasure having you on. And that's great about the book.

and when you eventually pass away, it won't be for a tremendous number of years. I'm sure the next person will come in and appraise those three books at pennies. Pennies on the dollar. Anyway, great seeing you and thanks again for coming on. Oh, thank you so much, Dave. Take care.