Thrift stores, flea markets and storage spaces sometimes turn out to be a real treasure trove. Among vintage clothes, cracked pottery and old electronics some lucky shoppers have snapped up super-valuable items, paying little-to-nothing for them. From Princess Diana's state dinner dress found in a charity shop to a James Bond car forgotten in a storage unit, we reveal 40 of the most incredible bargain buys of all time. Click or scroll through to find out what they are.
Items sold before 2010 have had their prices adjusted for inflation.
In 2013, Columbus, Ohio, resident Zach Bodish bagged a Picasso poster from his local Volunteers of America thrift store for $14.14 (£11). Assuming it was just a mass-market print, Bodish was astonished to discover the great painter's signature on the poster. He had the artwork appraised and it turned out to be an original printed by Picasso himself. The poster went on to sell for a not too shabby $7,000 (£5.4k).
Scott Amos was cleaning out his childhood home in Reno, Nevada, when he came across an unopened copy of the Nintendo game Kid Icarus. It had been bought in 1988 for $38.45 when Amos was just nine years old. The fact it was still sealed made the game a valuable item for collectors. At an online auction in August 2019, the rare game fetched $9,000 (£6.9k).
In 1970, a woman bought a plate in Rhode Island for less than $100 and it sat above her stove for years. In 2014 she took it along to be appraised on US TV show Antiques Roadshow and was shocked to discover it was a Picasso-designed Madoura plate from 1955 worth in the region of $10,000 (£7.7k).
Hoping to make a few pounds profit, a woman bought three wine glasses at a car boot sale in Portsmouth, England, for 40p (52 cents) each and took them to a saleroom to ask about their value. The bargain hunter was stunned when she learned that they were rare 18th century Beilby glass (similar to the one pictured), which were sold at auction in 2011 for a combined £18,880 ($24.6k) to a glass dealer.
This rare 16th-century statue of the Tibetan Green Tara goddess was snapped up at a car boot sale in West Sussex, England, for just £25 ($32.50). The anonymous buyer suspected it was worth a lot more, but was stunned when a valuer told her it was worth in the region of £5,000 ($6.5k). The statue went on to sell for an even more impressive £19,220 ($25k) when it went up for auction in 2016.
An impoverished German student lucked out big time in 2007 when she found a 17th-century oil painting in a second-hand couch she'd snapped up for just €150 at a Berlin flea market. The painting, Preparation to Escape to Egypt by a pupil of Italian artist Carlo Saraceni, was eventually sold for a whopping €19,200, an equivalent of $25,500 (£19.6k) in today's money, at an art auction in Hamburg.
An amateur collector came across this beautiful metallic Chinese bowl in a charity shop in Somerset, England. The antiques enthusiast paid just £2 ($2.60) for the 18th-century bowl, which was later valued at £5,000 ($6.5k). In 2016, it went on to sell at auction for a very respectable £21,000 ($27,300).
In 2002, music fan Warren Hill found an odd-looking acetate disc at a Manhattan flea market with 'The Velvet Underground' written on the label and bought it for 75 cents. The disc turned out to be a super-rare demo by the Velvet Underground and was sold on eBay in 2006 for $25,200, an equivalent of $31,960 (£24.6k) today.
Hunting for cheap canvases one day in 2012, Beth Feeback, a hard-up artist from North Carolina, made a beeline for her local charity shop and snagged a couple of oil paintings for $9.99 (£7.70), which she intended to paint over. Thankfully, before Feeback attempted to cover one of the pictures, a knowledgeable friend recognised it as the work of abstract artist Ilya Bolotowsky. Feeback put the painting up for auction at Sotheby's not long after, where it fetched more than $34,000 (£26.2k).
A sensational Goodwill store fund, bargain hunter Zach Norris was browsing in a local charity store in Phoenix, Arizona, in January 2015 when he discovered a watch with "LeCoultre Deep Sea Alarm Automatic" engraved on the face. Suspecting it could be worth a whole lot more than its $5.99 (£4.60) price tag, he bought the watch and had it valued. Turns out the vintage timepiece from 1959 was worth a fortune. Needless to say, Norris sold it a month later for a tidy $35,000 (£27k).
When Thea Jourdan from Hampshire, England, bought a pink stone brooch, surrounded by what she believed were faux diamonds, for only £20 ($26), she thought it was just a 'flashy old tat' for her four-year-old daughter's toybox. The girl's favourite jewellery was worn on errands and in school plays. However, when Jourdan was having a ring valued, the appraiser spotted the brooch, which turned out to be topaz and real diamonds thought to have once been worn by a Russian tsarina. It sold in 2011 for £32,000 ($42k).
During a shopping trip in 2014, Sean and Rikki McEvoy of Asheville, North Carolina paid $58 (£45) for a vintage sweatshirt from their local Goodwill store. Not long after, the couple were watching a documentary on legendary NFL coach Vince Lombardi and spotted him wearing the sweatshirt they'd bought – it sold at auction a year later for $43,020 (£33k).
A couple bought this glass vase for £1 from a car boot sale in Dumfries, Scotland, because they liked the look of the plant inside it. When the plant died, the vase was squirrelled away in the loft and almost forgotten about until TV show Antiques Roadshow came to town in 2008. Half-jokingly, the couple brought along the vase and were flabbergasted to discover it was a highly desirable piece by Art Nouveau icon René Lalique. They sold it later that year for £32,450, which is the equivalent of $56,700 (£43.6k) today when adjusted for inflation.
In 2013, an Australian antiques collector on the hunt for bargains spotted an interesting-looking cup in a thrift store in Sydney, priced at just AU$4 (US$2.70/£2). Suspecting it may be worth a lot more, the collector enlisted the services of a Sotheby's valuer, who revealed the object was a 17th-century Chinese rhinoceros horn 'libation' cup. The cup went on to fetch AU$75,500 (US$50.6k/£38.9k) at auction.
This 1936 painting by Australian artist John Wardell Power, entitled a Basket of Fruit, was last seen in Paris in 1945, until it turned up at a Dutch flea market in 2015. While the flea market price was never disclosed, the artwork was sold later that year at Bonhams auction house in Sydney for AU$170,800 ($115.2k/£88.5k).
This colourful painting of an Indian town scene caught the eye of a taxi driver at a car boot sale in north London. The bargain hunter successfully haggled down the £60 asking price to £40 before taking the artwork home with him, where it hung on the wall for some 30 years. In 2016, the man decided to redecorate and took the two-foot-wide canvas to Roseberys auction house. Exceeding all expectations, the painting believed to be the work of Sikh artist Baba Bishan Singh sold for a staggering £92,250 ($120.4k).
A very fortunate bargain hunter, who has chosen to remain anonymous, picked up an old Breitling watch at a car boot sale in 2013 for just £25 ($32). The mock Geiger counter was a dead giveaway: the watch was revealed to be the timepiece worn by Sean Connery in the James Bond movie Thunderball. The customised Breitling Top Time watch sold later that year at Christie's for £103,875 ($135.2k).
Goodwill retail stores in the US appear to be veritable troves of hidden treasure. In 2010, an 81-year-old South Carolina resident, who has chosen to remain anonymous, purchased a painting from his local Goodwill for just $3 (£2.30). On a whim, the man's daughter-in-law got it appraised by an expert from Antiques Roadshow – the picture was revealed to be a 17th-century Flemish masterpiece. It went on to fetch $190,000 (£146k) at auction in 2012.
This dress, worn by Princess Diana to a state dinner in Bahrain in 1986, was found in a charity shop in Herefordshire, England, in 1994 by a local woman. She bought it for just £200, paying in four £50 instalments. The silk dress, designed by David and Elizabeth Emanuel, was discovered and went to auction in December 2018, selling for £156,000 ($202.5k), surpassing its £60-£100.000 ($78-$130k) valuation.
In 2012, Robert Darvell, a graphic designer from London, was gifted a small landscape painting by his father Robin, who had purchased the picture as part of a £30 job lot some years before. Robert did some delving and discovered it was a genuine John Constable painting worth £250,000 ($324.5k). The story was featured on the TV show Treasure Detectives the following year.
Because he liked its gold frame, a Catholic priest bought this painting in an antique shop in Cheshire for £400 back in 1992. In 2013, Father Jamie MacLeod brought his find to the BBC's Antiques Roadshow, where it was identified as an oil sketch by Flemish Baroque painter Anthony Van Dyck. The artwork was restored, varified and valued at about £400,000 ($520k). It is now on long term loan at the Rubenshuis museum in Antwerp.
Enjoying a similar windfall, in 2006 Nashville resident Michael Sparks came across an old, rolled-up document in a neighbourhood thrift store, which he bought for a paltry $2.48. When Sparks unrolled the document, he couldn't believe his eyes – he had found a copy of the US Declaration of Independence from 1823, which he sold on in 2007 for $477,650, an equivalent of about $589,000 (£453k) in today's money.
A private collector from the south west of England took a gamble on a cracked teapot at an auction in 2016, buying it for just £15 ($19). He then took it to Woolley and Wallis auctioneers, and the ceramics experts established it was a piece by John Bartlam, who emigrated to America from Britain and was the first person to make porcelain in the US. As a truly historical artefact, it went for auction with an estimated price of $26,000 (£20k), but was sold for $748,000 (£575k) including fees to the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
With no idea what was inside, a couple from Long Island paid $100 at a blind auction for an unclaimed New York storage unit in 1989. However, their risk paid off as inside the container, covered under old blankets, was a real treasure – a Lotus Esprit sports car used for the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me as underwater vehicle. In 2013 the couple put their lucky find up for auction with Sotheby's London, where it sold for a whopping £616,000 ($802k). The buyer, as it was revealed later, was no one less than Tesla founder Elon Musk.
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An Edinburgh antiques dealer bought this chess piece for just £5 back in 1964, not realising its significance. It’s one of five lost pieces belonging to a set found buried in a sand dune on the Scottish island of Lewis back in 1831 that experts believe was made in the late 12th to early 13th century somewhere in Scandinavia. The other ‘Lewis chessmen’, as they are known, are on display at London’s British Museum and Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland. Made from walrus ivory, the piece was passed down through the dealer’s family before being sold at Sotheby’s in London for £735,000 ($954k), a record for a medieval chess piece, in July 2019.
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This beautiful 26-carat diamond ring was purchased by Debra Goddard at a car boot sale for a bargain £10 in the 1980s. Goddard thought it was made of glass at the time, but in fact the diamond centerpiece of the ring is thought to have been cut in the 19th century. It was kept in a box for 33 years until Goddard got it valued after her mother was a victim of fraud. She hoped that it would sell for £750, but the rare piece of jewellery was found to be worth far more. The diamond ring finally went under the hammer at Sotheby's in London in 2019, where it managed to fetch a whopping £740,000 ($963k), double the £350,000 ($455k) estimate.
One of only two Ford Mustangs custom-made for the classic film Bullitt, which boasts a 13-minute car chase in the middle of the movie, the car was found by a Mexican junkyard owner languishing in a corner of the scrapyard. Acquired for peanuts, it has an estimated value of at least $1 million (£770k).
A bag that world-famous astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin used to collect samples from the moon in 1969 was accidentally auctioned by NASA in 2015 to Illinois lawyer Nancy Carlson for only $955 (£736). Despite the space agency's attempts to reclaim the artefact from the Apollo 11 mission, Carlson went on to sell the bag that still contained particles of moon dust at a Sotheby's auction in 2017 for $1.8 million (£1.4m).
This still life was purchased at a garage sale for just $30 in the 1990s by a factory worker from Indiana, who used it to cover a hole in a wall in his home. Several years down the line, the hard-up machinist was playing the art-based card game Masterpiece and spotted a similar painting by the same artist on one of the cards. The picture, which turned out to be a notable work by American landscape painter Martin Johnson Heade called Magnolias on Gold Velvet Cloth, went on to sell for $1.25 million in 1999, which is an equivalent of $1.9 million (£1.5m) in today's money. Heade's work has repeatedly turned up in garage sales and other surprising places, which experts attribute to his popularity among middle-class buyers before he became acknowledged as a modern American master.
British tourist Andy Fields was on vacation in Las Vegas in 2010 when he hit a yard sale and bought five paintings for $5 (£3.85). Upon his return to the UK, Fields discovered a sketch hidden behind one of the paintings, which experts believe is an early sketch by a 10-year-old Warhol of French-Canadian singer Rudy Vallée, worth $2 million (£1.54m).
In 2013, a New York family made the sort of discovery most bargain hunters can only dream about. Rummaging around a neighbourhood garage sale, they chanced upon a fairly ordinary-looking white bowl but decided to buy it for $3 (£2.30). It later turned out to be a 1,000-year-old Chinese treasure and sold for $2.2 million (£1.7m) at auction.
A financial analyst from Philadelphia bought an old painting for $4 at a local market back in 1989 mainly because he liked the frame. When he went to remove the painting, he discovered an original copy of the US Declaration of Independence, one of just 24 existing copies, hidden between the picture and backing. Two years later, the document fetched a whopping $2.42 million at auction, the equivalent of $4.54 million (£3.5m) in today's money when adjusted for inflation.
Telecoms technician Randy Guijarro hit the jackpot in 2010 when he came across the Holy Grail of photography in a Fresno, California, antiques shop – an ultra-rare photo of outlaw Billy the Kid playing croquet. Guijarro paid just $2 (£1.55) for the snap, which has since been valued at a cool $5 million (£3.85m) by appraisers from Kagin's.
In 2007, New Yorkers Thomas Schultz and Lawrence Joseph paid $2,500 – the equivalent of $3,100 (£2.4k) today – for a huge collection of artworks by the late Armenian-American artist Arthur Pinajian, which they bought along with the artist's former home in Long Island. Now an art world sensation, works by Pinajian have skyrocketed in value, and the collection was recently valued at $30 million (£23m).
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In 2012, a scrap metal dealer in the Midwest decided to do some online research on a elaborate egg-shaped ornament he had picked up for $13,000 (£10k), which he intended to melt down. The dealer searched for "Vacherin Constantin", the name engraved on the ornament, and soon discovered that he had bought the Third Imperial Fabergé egg. Valued at $33 million (£25.4m), the egg was purchased in 2014 by a private collector.
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