The collecting of antiques can involve almost any type of item from almost any era in history providing it’s more than one hundred years old and deciding which area to focus on might be but needn’t be a very daunting one.
If your primary interest in antique collecting is financial then your approach will be very different from someone who collects things because he feels an affinity for a certain type of antique or era.
If you want to make money from antique collecting and have significant financial resources then you would do best to only deal in brand names that are continually sought after and whose prices continue to rise because of their scarcity. These items would be things such as Chippendale furniture and Tiffany lamps because they are continually sought after and there is almost zero chance that they will go down in price.
However if your intent is to make money but you only have limited resources then you should look for undervalued items that can easily be sold for a quick profit. The best way to locate such articles is to visit swap meets and garage sales and to check out the classified advertisements. You will have to be ready to act quickly and it will be helpful if you have a network, however small, of people to whom you can resell. The forgoing can result in very high profits but you’ll need to know your field well and to know almost instinctively if a price is high or low! If you intend to make money in this way then I would recommend choosing a particular niche and learning it well.
Many people have made large amounts of money from antiques without even trying to and that is because they collected things that they loved and had an affinity with them. They love and almost live for a particular item or era and know it inside out, they rarely sell their purchases and if they do they buy something similar in the same area.
It follows then that if money is not your major concern that you should seek out a niche that particularly appeals to you and work strictly in that area and a particularly nice bonus is that you will find that the necessary research involved will be a pleasure and not a chore.
Perhaps the ideal approach should be a mixture of the above, doing something that one loves and also making a living from it and most of the very successful antique dealers that I’m acquainted with make a very good living by doing just that.
They do something that they love!