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 July 1. of 2021. PSA received more cards in 3 days than they did in the previous 3 months, leading to the backlog and ultimately the difficult decision to suspend new submissions for a couple of months.
Well, let’s see the impact this can have in the short term. The long haul should be negligible for the sports card industry, as it appears at the moment, as they intend to return to servicing all PSA rating levels within 90 days.
1 – People I think will take a step back and take note as they inspect each card and really enjoy the card they will look for what is more rather than just looking for a rated card as they won’t rate nearly as many cards as before simply due to the postponement of PSA services.
2 – With SGC (Sportscard Guaranty Company) for a minimum of $75/card and BGS (Beckett Grading Services) to a minimum of $100/card to qualify a card within 1 month or less, we most likely won’t see a huge increase in business as PSA still has Super Express service open at $350/card and their brand has much higher values on the open market.
3 – The suspension of PSA Grading services leave an opportunity for companies like HGA (Hybrid Grading) and CSG (Certified Sports Guaranty) to catch up, especially on lower-end cards with values of $500 or less due to their low-cost grading services. So far, I think it will be CSG that has the best chance of grabbing a good chunk of the $500 or less value card market away from PSA, at least in the short term, as long as PSA’s value service is 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 they should especially go up on lower-end cards valued at $1k or less simply because you can’t qualify with any PSA sports card at that value unless you want to use the Super Express Service, but that would not make financial sense to do so at $350 per card. I expect this to create more demand for those cards in the short term. However, in the long run, many of the base level cards that are PSA 10 should return to normal values once/if PSA resumes their value service which is currently set at $25/card. However, the higher value commodity cards in all markets (baseball, football, basketball, etc.) should continue to rise as fewer are available on the market, which is the simple rule of supply and the demand.
