As an eBay seller and a frequent visitor of estate sales, I'm constantly learning about new items that are collected by people.  Some of them are surprising,some are sort of expected.  Sometimes you see something and even though you may not have thought about it before, it just screams "collectible" when you find it.

photo credit: someToast
Vintage pennants are one such item.  I don't know why they didn't really stick out in my mind.  When I was a kid, I was given a Steelers football pennant signed by about 75% of the players from the Super Bowl X team.  I hung on to that thing and loved showing it off.  After I got older, I put it in storage and lost it to water damage.  I was pretty bummed out.

Every once in a while I'll come across a cool old baseball pennant in my travels.  When I list them, they usually do pretty well, but you never really know for sure if the right collectors will be looking when you put it up for auction.  One of my favorite ones was an early 1950s Pittsburgh Pirates pennant.  It was a little bit beat up, but it grabbed my attention when I saw it.  The older style art on it made me look past the few wrinkles it had.  It didn't have any autographs from famous players and I picked it up for something like fifteen dollars.  The funny thing is, as I walked out of the estate sale, a guy came up to me and offered me thirty bucks for it on the spot.  I decided to hang on to it.

If you are looking to buy pennants, eBay is definitely one of the places to check first.  The selection is excellent and surprisingly you may find that the prices are better than some other places you could look.  Once a pennant makes it into a collectibles type of shop, you can usually count on them charging top dollar for it.

If you are up for a lot of driving around, you can also do what I do.  Going to tons of estate sales and garage sales is very time consuming though.  I also think that I was one of the only people who wasn't thinking about how collectible pennants can be.  Yard sales will still sometimes bring you a good deal if the people really want to get rid of some old stuff, but despite my nice Pirates pennant find, estate sales usually price collectible items pretty high.  I have walked away from many collectible items at these sales that were priced way too high for my tastes.  Another option is to actually visit or contact various halls of fame for the sports you are interested in.  They sometimes offer these older items for sale, but I don't know what kind of prices they would charge.  I wouldn't expect them to be cheap.

photo credit: johnnycorduroy

I do a lot of research as I find collectibles.  It seems that mini-pennants are a bit more reasonably priced than the full size ones.  They are still very collectible though.  I have seen many of these mini versions with names of colleges and various geographical points of interest on them.  I have also found some pennants for things like the PA Turnpike!  Who would have thought of that?