What was the last piece of new furniture that you bought? How long have you had it? Can you sell it for what you paid for it……stop laughing. Of course you can’t.
But do you know if you’d have bought an antique iron bed…….you could. And do you know that any antique bed you buy is going up in value at a rate few investments can match. Why? Because it’s the old law of “supply and demand”….. as the supply goes down and the demand goes up, the price will continue to climb. It’s an absolute, written in stone. The more people that want antique iron beds and the lower the supply becomes…due to the finite amount of them that were made, the prices will continue to climb.
Another way of realizing the investment potential of iron beds is by seeing the amount of reproductions on the “market”. Whenever there aren’t enough of an original item to satisfy the demand for that item…….reproductions of that item will spring up to fill the demand. But the originals, like metal beds, will continue to climb and climb in price.
I’ve had people buy beds from me for their children….. their children grow up and have me convert their bed to king size and then sometimes pass it along to their own children. I’ve seen metal beds that stay in the same family go up 200 to 300% in value.
One of my favorite stories is about an employee who worked for me 20 years ago. At the time he was a very reliable hard working guy. At Christmas time I gave him a bed he had made a remark about liking. He refinished with the other beds he was doing for me and I helped him get it set up in his apartment. Flash forward 20 years…….. I hadn’t seen him for 15 years and then ran into him in Santa Monica parking his car. I stopped and we chatted a little and I asked how he’d been. He had gone back to school and had gotten a good engineering job with the city. He was driving a really great looking vintage pick-up that had been completely restored. I remarked how great it looked. He said his car had broken down about a year ago. He’d been in need of money because he was without a ride, so he sold his bed and got enough to buy the pick-up, which he then restored after he’d secured his new job.
It sure paid to hang on to that metal bed I’d given him.
