A RARE 50p coin has sold for £370 on eBay after one buyer was willing to spend well over 600 times its face value for a chance to snap it up.
It’s one of the 210,000 minted Kew Gardens 50ps, that rare coin collectors are always keen to get their hands on.
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In the listing the seller even notes that the “50p coin is the lowest mintage circulation coin ever produced by the Royal Mint.”
It’s this and the commemorative design on the obverse, depicting the Chinese pagoda from the popular London attraction, that experts would suspect has driven the auction price up so high.
According to The Royal Mint, the rare 50p coin is actually one of the top ten rarest in circulation.
The coin is also number one in Changechecker‘s most recent 50p scarcity index, and it hasn’t moved from this position for a number of years now.
Cashing in on those features, the seller of this particular coin managed to bag exactly £370 on November 2.
That was after 29 bids had been placed over just a three day period.
It only started at £10, but rocketed in value within a matter of days, and at the will of nine different bidders.
But it’s not the most we’ve seen the coin go for before, as one has sold for as much as £707 in the past.
But another sold for only £281 last month, and a similar listing only managed to reach £170 a few weeks ago.
So the true value can vary from one day to the next.
Rare coins and valuable notes – is yours worth a mint?
But, come across a copy in your own change, and you could be quids in too.
Lots of sellers make big money auctioning off this type of coin on eBay.
Here’s how you could do that:
How to spot one in your change
Look out for unique designs on the change kicking about in your wallet.
Usually the images found on the obverse will have been created to commemorate an event or location, along with a period of time in history.
There is a whole collection of rare Olympic 50p coins for example that can fetch a pretty penny on eBay, you might find some of these crop up in your change since their introduction after the London 2012 games.
But it’s not only that, rare error coins are just as popular with collectors.
Many love to snap these up due to their low mintage figures after having been produced with notable mistakes.
They’re all real legal tender though, so unknowing shoppers or sellers could be passing the coins through wallets, hands and transactions at face value all over the country.
What next?
If you find one, get it verified by The Royal Mint to help reassure buyers that they’re paying for the real deal – you may even be able to hike up the price a bit.
You’ll also find that online tools from change experts like Coin Hunter are helpful to see how much it could be worth.
Compare other rare coins on eBay to see how much they have sold for as reference, – in the past the 50ps have sold for triple figures, on more than one occasion too.
Remember that on eBay a buyer can always pull out too, which means the coin won’t have sold for the price it appears to have.
The number of bids on the listing can prove how popular a coin in similar condition could be, as well as show that others were willing to place offers against one another.
But you should always be wary of fakes circulating online as well, these won’t be worth as much in value so you could end up cashing out on the wrong thing.
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