Page 1 of 2

Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Mon Feb 25, 2019 4:46 pm
by señormisterioso
Hey, I'm trying to have some reference and manage expectations regarding prices for Jazzmasters. To be specific Pre CBS custom colors.

I get it...good luck with that. The price of a vintage instrument is whatever price you are willing to pay for, or how cheap you manage to snatch an instrument at an auction or negotiation.

That said, since there are no more widows needing to get rid of their defunt husbands under-the-bed guitar from the days he played at a surf band... , and internet keeps very few secrets, is anyone keeping track of prices?

I do buy this every year:
https://www.vintageguitar.com/price-guide/
I'm just looking for something a bit more detailed than: 1962 - various colours....

Has anyone ever tried to get a tally of custom orders from those Pre CBS days? types of colors and more important number of orders of the color?

Who in here is the illuminati with the spreadsheet?? Show yourself.
:-*

Any recorded data sale or ask from the last few of years (including 65') ?

LPB
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1965:

Daphne
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1965:

Shoreline:
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1965:

OW:
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1965:

Burgundy
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1965:

Inca
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1965:

Fiesta
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1965:

Dakota
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1965:

Black
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1965:

Sonic
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1965:

Shell....

Foam Green
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1965:

Surf Green
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1965:

Sherwood
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1965:

CAR
- 1960:
- 1961:
- 1962:
- 1963:
- 1964:
- 1965:

Re: Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2019 8:49 am
by Jaguar018
Come on man. You forgot to ask about geographical locations and hi rez pictures for every example. Might as well go all the way.

Re: Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2019 8:53 am
by fendercollection
Any custom color Fender is pretty hot right now, especially the rarer custom colors :) The vintage guitar price guide is almost always going to be lower than market pricing

Re: Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2019 9:08 am
by señormisterioso
@Jaguar018 hahahah! True. I'm gonna try to gather some info and see what I can put together before I just ask into the wild ether next time.

The big issue is that Reverb, might be the closest thing these days to a price list or chart, and is really really weak. It doesn't take into account that a sale for a 1926 FIesta Red (for example) might be a refin...So its just generates a point in the time line telling you that a guitar sold for $3,000 last month...I wish I could go back and see the actual listing... like eBay "completed listings" back in the day.

Re: Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2019 9:12 am
by señormisterioso
@ fendercollection

Yeah, I feel the price guides all tend to show lower prices. Does anyone know how they gather data? Is it thru the guitar trading shows?

Obviously whatever Norman's at Rare Guitars payed for a private collection is not going to be very representative of the actual price to the rest of us humans....

Cheers! Thank you for responding nevertheless.

Just learning here!

Re: Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2019 10:17 am
by bacca51
One thing that I’ve noticed with Reverb is that when you look at the listing of a guitar thats already been sold, it shows you the asking price, not the price that the guitar sold for.

For example, I bought a guitar from CME and the price we agreed on was $900, but if you were to search for that guitar and come across the old listing of my guitar, it shows that the listing ended and the price was $1,095, the asking price.

From my understanding Reverb does this to keep the prices higher for guitars, which means more money for Reverb. I’m very skeptical of any sort of market prices that they have based on past listings.

Re: Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2019 10:38 am
by señormisterioso
bacca51 wrote:
Tue Feb 26, 2019 10:17 am
One thing that I’ve noticed with Reverb is that when you look at the listing of a guitar thats already been sold, it shows you the asking price, not the price that the guitar sold for.

For example, I bought a guitar from CME and the price we agreed on was $900, but if you were to search for that guitar and come across the old listing of my guitar, it shows that the listing ended and the price was $1,095, the asking price.

From my understanding Reverb does this to keep the prices higher for guitars, which means more money for Reverb. I’m very skeptical of any sort of market prices that they have based on past listings.
Right! definitely unreliable. Imagine when it gets into the whole vintage market....

I must do some digging.

Re: Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2019 11:14 am
by Embenny
Yep, drives me insane when local sellers with an obvious refin LPB JM point to a Reverb asking price of an original and go "See, this guitar is worth $7,000."

I don't think anyone has a reliable central directory of how much CC guitars were made. All I know is that the proportion of CCs to sunbursts on vintage Fenders has been climbing steadily since the 90's.

I wonder why that is?

Re: Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2019 11:55 am
by Pacafeliz
i have an original 1973 Fender price list... just in case... :whistle:

Re: Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2019 12:32 pm
by señormisterioso
Pacafeliz wrote:
Tue Feb 26, 2019 11:55 am
i have an original 1973 Fender price list... just in case... :whistle:
!!! You mean from like a german store? or from fender dealership? Care to share? just for the fun of it?

I bet the price of CC JMs, if charted, looks like bitcoin...

Re: Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2019 1:17 pm
by bterry
Honestly, the original pre-cbs prices are not a mystery - do a google search, you’ll find them, at least for certain years.

As for modern pricing on vintage JMs, there are way too many variables to take into account and having a generic pricing guide would be pretty much useless as online prices are only reflective of the online market, which is particular and tends to represent both buyers and sellers who are, shall we say, a bit less than ‘experts’ when it comes to the guitars they are buying and selling. Even most of the big vintage dealers are selling guitars as original when they are not, I’ve personally got many examples from 4 or 5 well-known vintage dealers just in the past few months.

Condition and originality are everything when it comes to vintage guitars, so the details mean the difference between $$ and $$$$. Unless you know exactly what you’re looking at, a price list will only be inaccurate, at best.

Re: Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2019 1:57 pm
by scottT
What is always interesting is that when the prices are adjusted for inflation, they were just as expensive then as we think new ones are now!

Re: Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2019 12:51 am
by mgeek
scottT wrote:
Tue Feb 26, 2019 1:57 pm
What is always interesting is that when the prices are adjusted for inflation, they were just as expensive then as we think new ones are now!
I'm quite the fan of adjusting prices for inflation, cos it makes pretty much any guitar I want to buy appear to be a massive bargain ;)

I paid £450 for a 1965 Vox Phantom a while back, original list price, £90. According to measuringworth.com that's over a grand and a half in todays money...getting a fifty something year old guitar for a third of it's original price is a huge bargain imo.

Custom colour Jazzmasters have deffo gone up from their original value, but if you buy them on a good day, probably not all that much. '59 Les Pauls. 50s strats and teles, those are the things that have really gone nuts

Re: Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2019 11:22 am
by Mechanical Birds
mgeek wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 12:51 am
scottT wrote:
Tue Feb 26, 2019 1:57 pm
What is always interesting is that when the prices are adjusted for inflation, they were just as expensive then as we think new ones are now!
I'm quite the fan of adjusting prices for inflation, cos it makes pretty much any guitar I want to buy appear to be a massive bargain ;)

I paid £450 for a 1965 Vox Phantom a while back, original list price, £90. According to measuringworth.com that's over a grand and a half in todays money...getting a fifty something year old guitar for a third of it's original price is a huge bargain imo.

Custom colour Jazzmasters have deffo gone up from their original value, but if you buy them on a good day, probably not all that much. '59 Les Pauls. 50s strats and teles, those are the things that have really gone nuts
And it seems like right now we’re on the ballpoint of the same thing happening to Jazzmasters and Jaguars alike, though Jags are pretty much universally cheaper, their prices have straight up doubled in the past ~5 years that I’ve paid really close attention.

And it seems like that’s typical, which really sucks. We’ve all read it countless times I’m sure, how Gen-Xers are mostly career aged and equipped to the degree that Boomers we’re in the 80s/90s and that X guitar heros were more likely to be playing a Jaguar or whatever cuz GRUNGE and that’s the equivalent of our parents lusting after some Eric Clapton guitar. It’s nice to know that the guitars I like from back then are still universally cheaper and thus easy to snag when compared to Pauls and Strats but in practice that means nothing because I’ll probably never be in a position to spend $8,000 on my dream custom color guitar. Knowing that it’s Strat counterpart sells for often 5x that amount isn’t very comforting when you realize that it’s still prohibitively expensive.

And that’s just what I’ve seen recently. Growing up in Bedt Virginia, I didn’t see a Jazzmaster or Jaguar in person until I was in high school in the early 2000s and happened to go to the Pittsburgh Guitar Center for the first time. I remember looking on eBay though and now I pretty much hate myself for not working back then because I could have hoarded all kinds of guitars. I saw more than one old Mustang sell for less than $800 and a sickening amount of Jaguars and Jazzmasters sell for significantly less than $2,000. I kind of quit guitar between 2009-2013ish but had stopped paying attention to used prices long before that and even when I started giving a shit again, I remember in the early days of reverb I’d see LPB Jaguars and (Though much rarer) Jazzmasters selling for between $3,000 and $4,000. Now, it seems like unless you’re pushing around close to $6,000 to $8,000 obtaining a clean example that’s pre-cbs and all original, it’s pretty hard to get one.

Re: Jazzmaster Historic Price List

Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2019 8:29 am
by Pacafeliz
señormisterioso wrote:
Tue Feb 26, 2019 12:32 pm
Pacafeliz wrote:
Tue Feb 26, 2019 11:55 am
i have an original 1973 Fender price list... just in case... :whistle:
!!! You mean from like a german store? or from fender dealership? Care to share? just for the fun of it?

I bet the price of CC JMs, if charted, looks like bitcoin...
Here ya go!

Image