Well, the seller had initially set their auction at ¥700,000 and there were no bites… despite the H-5005 usually coming close to ¥1,000,000. And when that failed to get any buyers, they started out low… ¥9,500! So it did attract a lot of bidders. Final close? ¥556,000. A new low?
EDIT: Sorry, I should’ve said “a new low off of the recent record breaking high” because of course, the H-5005 had much lower selling prices many years back!
i would say no:
Automatic H-5005 51010, 61020, 53010, 100000, 501000, 820000, 928926, 550000, 900000, 519121, 100001, 1001000
letting aside the old stuff, it seems one of the last auctions I catched was lower? but i didn’t note down boxed/condition etc. anyway, i guess you have one of the best data bases here?
No, I don’t think so. The pricing has been pretty consistent. The two anomalies I can think off would be from earlier this year. That’s only because they were brand new with the original boxes and stickers.
I’m glad you made an effort to keep track of earlier auction pricing. Do you have dates tied to those prices? That would be so informative!
unfortunately not. i started it just as buying aid, but kept noting down figures. so now it is more interesting to see developments than as buying indication 
I was keeping track of auctions for a time, organizing them with links in folders… and was pretty proud of myself, until the one fateful day when I realized… DOH! On Yahoo Japan, the links expire after 3~6 months. Yes, you can use Aucview to look at older auctions, but unless you’re a paid subscriber the prices are blurred out. I lost so much useful info. However, I did at one point started to add date and closing auction price in the link titles, which helped. Still, a bit frustrating not having auction bid history.
Anyway, for auctions of high interest, I’ve been trying to get into the habit of creating an image copy and saving it.
And again… another “relatively recent” low for the H-5005. ¥450,000. It seems that collectors who’d been holding onto them for some time are starting to let them go, thinking they can maximize profit. But that ceiling appears to be long gone (¥1,000,000)–no one has the stomach for it. Recent heavy bidder 2f4 nabbed it.
I think one reason is the more frequent appearing of H5005s in the last months/years … Remember Zhenyang Xiao’s public search for it – I think he had to look around for years. Now there is quasi constant supply (although of course not all with reasonable pricing).
Probably that + a lack of demand from heavy weight collectors, the guys that would spend 10k on a 5005 already got their hands on quite a few so the supply is higher and the demand is ““lower””.
Yeah, I think it may have been about 3 years ago when Xiao scored his ¥850,000 H-5005… and shortly thereafter an auction closed at ¥1,000,000. Then another one about a month or so later. I wasn’t keeping keen track of it, but did spy about two more since that were in the ¥800,000~900,000 zone. Then there was a bit of a gap.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see if any go as low as ¥250,000 without box.
True. There’s also the matter of exchange rate. We’ve been lucky since 2021, as the USD to JPY exchange rate has gone up, hitting a peak in October of 2022. It was 2013 for the last time there was even parity. And I distinctly remember the 2008~2012 period where the JPY was higher than the USD. It was painful.
The EUR seems to have tracked about the same as the USD with respect to JPY exchange.
I’m curious… what’s the most you’d pay for an H-5005? I’d say my upper limit is about $2,000 USD. If they keep appearing in the wild as often as they have lately, I’m starting to think that it might come down even lower than that.
I’m about the same—$2000–$2500 for a perfect specimen.
$2501, Bob.
Yeah, and without box. Don’t need that extra item which entices much higher bidding.
Closest… without going over!
And user grade, with lettering flaked off? $1,000 USD.
Im gonna be banished for this but my limit would be $1,000 USD - preferably lower.
Why banished?
In truth, this pencil isn’t worth more than $200~$300. The latest Pilot Automac has just as good a mechanism, from what I’ve been told. The other consideration is the narrow collector pool. Always remember that auction prices are subjective, because it comes down to just 2 bidders, one upping the other, until they stop. So “true market” is hard to fathom. You can get somewhat of a sense of it if auction closing prices are generally consistent and it’s different bidders every time.
This is laughably untrue.
A 4mm double-knock vs. a conical-tipped auto knock feels like a different galaxy to me.
I consider these pencils distant cousins at best.
Plus, the Automac flat out sucks—the tip design produces squeaking while writing.
The way I view the H-5005 is simple: It’s the most tightly-calibrated stainless steel double-knock in existence, which makes it inherently worth more than just about anything else. Also, I place an extremely high value on stainless steel double-knocks from Pilot simply because the H-100X, H-200X, H-210X, H-300X, and Automatic lineage—the Mount Olympus of MPs—doesn’t include a single all-steel specimen (but at least the Automatic features steel-on-steel threading).
