Appraising Clutter

Appraising CLUTTER
By: Alan C. Iannacito, ASA

Clutter: we’ve all seen it, been stuck between it and worried exceedingly -- how to value the stuff? Stuff in the corners, stuff in the back room, stuff in the warehouse, stuff in the bone-yard.

In many cases the bone-yard is a temporary place for seasonable equipment. For example, the photo below shows a mix of seasonal items, obsolete equipment and scrap.
(photo not available)

Seasonal fish net/pots, tables and conveyors with the retired equipment of a Kodiak Island fishery.

Dealing with industrial mess is a matter of recognition, experience, and triage. Appraisers are asked to find value in clutter.

To begin:
• Ask the responsible plant staff what they want included and how important are the minor items.
• As you walk through, organize the items in your mind as well as on the listing.
• Classify equipment by utility and apparent value.
• Are the items obsolete or seasonal? Do they have future use at the location?
• Is the item important or is it in the pile because no one knows where it is, or has someone saved it because they thought that they may need it someday?
• Was it ordered and dumped because the plant really doesn’t need it now?
• Is it still on the personal property tax schedule?

Often idle equipment is brought from another plant and dumped for lack of a better place to put it. Maybe, the appraiser is the only reliable organizer because of fresh eyes or curiosity that wants answers. If we don’t know we ask. The example below was found in the corner of a hanger plant.

This Hanger/Cape machine, inherited from another plant, was buried behind boxes and work-in-progress. It has a limited market, and is of no use to the present location, but still has market value.

The above machine was placed on the manufacturing floor, but abandoned in place and hidden. In the same plant, I squeezed between, or walked from the tops of the equipment over machine tools, hanger wire formers and unrelated machinery. The inherited machines were shoved into a corner of the plant.

I listed the most marketable machine tools, lumped old an incomplete machines and made a note that the remainder had little or scrap value. I asked the people in charge before I discarded what I thought were cripples. Some of the nastiest looking equipment may have further use.

In appraisals of multiples in the bone-yard and castaways, it isn’t practical to value each piece by the cost, market, and income approach. The fees and expenses don’t warrant an estimate of each as in-place-in-use value, and estimating the economic life and cost-to-cure.

However, if the equipment is seasonable, i.e. canneries, fisheries, holiday specialties, sewing equipment, weather related equipment, it may have been shoved into a corner because there is no other place to put it. Appraisers still have to find such items and list them.

Pick out the machine in the picture below that has real value -- it’s not the old wash machine or the hose crimp in the background. (photo not available)

Foreground: 25LB “New Little Giant” Forging Hammer probably made about 1912 as an “improved” version with a wrap around hammer guard.

The “New Little Giant” forging hammer above looks like a display from a Smithsonian Museum, and it could be. Some of these machines, still in use, are over 100 years old. A blacksmith or metal artist can buy parts for the machine, and there are people in the blacksmith’s trade that rebuild and sell these machines. The one pictured has a market at $1500 in its present condition. Rebuilt 25LB trip hammers sell in the $5000 range. They have a mystique and an intrinsic value.

When I first saw the “New Little Giant” I was tempted to write it off as scrap. However, I found the name, and through the internet I found a community of trip-hammer users. For this appraisal the trip-hammer was a minor item, abandoned in the old forge shop. The owner forgot about it but remembered that someone had made an offer of $850 for the hammer a few months before the appraisal.

Past assignments have asked me to find and appraise industrial artifacts; old things that someone thinks have value. Clutters of foundry patterns are one example of what the manufacturer or a museum sees as valuable, when the market sees them differently.