With Hasbro's slow down of 3.75", a couple weeks ago I decided to wade back into Vintage just a little bit and bought an X-Wing on eBay. I have 7 or 8 vehicles, but no:
X-Wing
B-Wing
Imperial Shuttle
TIE Fighter
TIE Advanced
A-Wing
Skiff
Falcon
Rebel Transport
Sandcrawler
So, I find a deal on a restored X-Wing that I'm happy with and buy it.
Yesterday I was thinking the A-Wing might be next up because it was always my favorite as a kid, so I looked up recently completed auctions on that one.. What I found was that Vintage stuff seems to be far far more expensive than when I assembled my set.
The last 4 that I bought were Yak Face, Stormtrooper Luke, Blue Snag, Pop-up Artoo. I think I paid about $550 total for really nice examples of them. I did that all at once with birthday cash sometime around 7 or 8 years ago.
From what I saw last night, it seems that those figures are $350 to $400 EACH. My A-Wing search showed lots of A-Wing Pilots with the coin in the $200-$225 range... It was much longer ago than the other four I'm talking about, but I paid $50 for mine maybe 15 years ago. I also saw tons of lots of figures that don't seem like anything terribly special to me, maybe with one or two last 17 figures thrown in that are selling for many hundreds, and even thousands of dollars.
So my question is - when did this happen? Has it been gradual or has there been a more recent spike?