Valuations are undertaken at our office in Northleach. We occasionally make home visits, but only for particularly valuable collections.
Valuations are available by appointment only. For clients who live some distance away, we are happy to get collections picked up by courier (at our expense) and delivered to our office.
Valuation options…
Since Covid, we are continuing to offer courier uplift and drop-off appointments only.
- Drop off appointment: drop off your collection in person for a receipt, so that we may carry out the valuation in our own time. Once completed, we will contact you to advise the outcome and so that you can decide how to proceed.
- Ship the collection by courier: we can arrange to have collections picked up by courier (at our expense) and brought here for assessment. The collection would need to be well packed, in line with our Packing Guidelines.
How to send us images of your collection...
Valuation enquiries and submission of images can be made in the following ways…
• Email your images (including details of your collection) to info@upastampauctions.co.uk
• Complete the Valuation Enquiry form to send us details of your collection.
• Send us some colour photocopies (including details of your collection and your full contact details) to: UPA (Valuations), 4 The Old Coalyard, West End, Northleach, Cheltenham, Glos. GL54 3HE
Photographing your collection…
• We don’t need a photo of every stamp, simply a good representation of the collection.
• If the stamps are in an album: photo a few of the more complete pages, i.e. the pages with the most stamps on them.
• If the stamps are loose: take a batch of approx 20-30, lay them on a flat surface and take a photo/scan – you can do this with a few batches.
• Limit the number of images to a maximum of 20.
• JPEG files are ideal, but please don’t send very high resolution images. Try to contain all images within one email, but avoid sending emails that exceed 10MB in size (our system may not accept it).
• Please don’t send lots of photos of individual stamps, it’s not efficient for us to handle – one photo per album page is ideal.
We try and reply to all enquiries within 48 hours (excluding weekends, bank holidays and holiday periods). Please contact us if you don’t receive a reply at all, we may not have received your email or maybe our reply went into your Spam/Junk folder.
We often buy collections in their entirety and then break them down, with material going into either our quarterly postal auctions, Approvals department or our eBay outlets. However, more valuable items (£1,000+) may be sold on a commission basis through our auction using our UPA Vendor service; this is something we can discuss with you in more detail in due course.
Please contact us if you would like to discuss your requirements further, or please call to make an appointment.
Valuation Terms
- All collections are fully insured (at no extra cost) whilst in transit to our Head Office, and whilst in our care for valuation purposes, including return shipping if your collection is returned to you.
- Courier uplift and return shipping costs (if you choose to have the collection returned to you) are covered by UPA, unless otherwise advised.
- Whilst we endeavour to complete valuations as soon as possible, we are unable to specify a time frame due to additional factors (eg. size of your collection, the auction cycle, other pending valuations). However, if you have specific requirements we are happy to discuss this with you.