On March 30, 2021, PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator) announced that it would temporarily suspend all of its qualifying services below Super Express ($350 per card) for at least 90 days with the hope of reopening all services around March 1. July 2021. PSA received more cards in 3 days than in the previous 3 months, which is what led to the backlog and ultimately the difficult decision to suspend new submissions for a couple of months.
Well, let’s see what impact this can have in the short term. The long term should be insignificant for the sports card industry, as it appears at this point, as they intend to return to servicing all PSA rating levels within 90 days.
1 – People I think will step back and take note as they inspect each card and really enjoy the card, look for what’s more instead of just looking for a rated card as they won’t rate nearly as many cards as they used to simply because of the deferment of PSA services.
2 – With SGC (Sportscard Guaranty Company) at a minimum of $75/card and BGS (Beckett Grading Services) at a minimum of $100/card to qualify a card within 1 month or less, chances are we won’t see much of an increase in business as PSA still has the Super Express service open at $350/card and its brand has much higher open market values.
3 – The suspension of PSA grading services leaves an opportunity for companies like HGA (Hybrid Grading) and CSG (Certified Sports Guaranty) to make up ground, especially on lower-end cards with values of $500 or less due to their low cost. classification services. So far, I think it will be CSG that has the best chance of taking a good chunk of the $500 or less value card market share away from PSA, at least in the short term, as long as PSA’s value service be suspended. The unknown variable is how much CSG retains in market share if PSA resets the value rating service to $25.
4 – In the short term, PSA 10 values should go up on all cards, but especially should go up on low-end cards valued at $1k or less simply because you can’t qualify with any PSA sports card at that value unless you I would like. use the Super Express service, but that wouldn’t make financial sense at $350 per card. I hope this will create more demand for those cards in the short term. However, in the long term, many of the base level cards that are PSA 10’s should return to normal values once/if PSA resumes their value service which is currently set at $25/card. The higher value commodity cards in all markets (baseball, football, basketball, etc.) should continue to rise as there are fewer available in the market, which is the simple rule of supply and demand.
