Bill Norfleet has been collecting coins for years. After retiring, he took his hobby to the next level by opening Brazito Coins and Collectibles, located at 2525 Northwest Expressway, Suite 222 in Oklahoma City.
“I’ve collected coins for a long time, and when I retired, I decided I’d just start selling some and buying some and trading back and forth,” he said. “It keeps me off the sofa. It helps me to meet people and do things.” I especially enjoy meeting with veterans. Roughly 38% of U.S. older veterans report actively or in the past collecting coins.
Norfleet sells and buys coins at coin shows, sells coins online and meets with individuals by appointment only at his Oklahoma City office.
“I’m not a high-pressure salesman at all,” he said. “I’m not going to pressure them to sell them (coins). I just try to help them (with coin information/values). Hopefully they’ll come back when they do want to sell them if they do.”
Norfleet said the internet has changed the way coins are
sold, with online sales increasingly replacing traditional storefront businesses.
“The online section is taking over from the storefront business,” he said. “Coin shows are not a storefront, but they’re akin to them. It’s face-to-face-stuff. I’m afraid that the (smaller) coin show deal is kind of dying.”
However, larger coin shows continue to attract buyers and sellers from across the country.
“One of the biggest ones in the country is in Orlando, Florida,” he said. “We went to that one in January. It had 660 tables. We went to one a couple weeks ago in Houston. That’s a pretty good size show with 120 tables. There was a lot going on there. A lot of people buy and sell. The bigger shows have many different things there, and you draw a whole lot more people.”
To help increase attendance at Oklahoma coin shows, Norfleet is using email to attract more attendees.
“We are trying something new. We’re going to send out an email to about the first 1,000 people that are identified as having an interest in coins,” he said. “We’ll send out a few emails, one of them four weeks before the event and one another week or 10 days before the event. We’ll see how that works.”
Norfleet said his website features a variety of certified coins. Certified coins have been graded by an authoritative third party, such as the Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS) or Numismatic Guaranty Company (NGC).
A certified coin is placed in a tamper-evident encapsulation, or slab, by the organization that certified and graded it. The slab contains the necessary information to verify the coin’s grade and authenticity.
“A lot of what we have for sale are what are called certified coins, and they’re in a plastic container,” he said.
Coin collectors have a wide variety of interests, Norfleet said.
“It’s just wide (coin interests),” he said. “Two of the most popular of all time are Morgan dollars and Peace dollars. The (Morgan) were made from 1878 to 1921. Now there were some years in the 1920’s and 1930’s when they weren’t made because the price of silver got to where it didn’t make sense to make a dollar with
it. They made a few in 1934 and 1935. The Peace dollars were made from 1921 to 1935. Gold coins are popular. The Indian head two-and-a-half-, five- and ten-dollar Indian head gold coins. The Saint-Gaudens coins are popular.”
Norfleet also receives phone calls from people interested in selling their coins and finding out what they might be worth.
“We talk about what they have, and that gives me a good feel whether it’s worth their time and mine for us to get together or not,” he said. “I had one lady call and said she had a lot of foreign coins she was interested in getting appraised. I told her I didn’t handle foreign coins, but I gave her information on some people who do. Sometimes you get people who don’t have any children or grandchildren, or as is my case, don’t have any children or grandchildren who are interested in coins. That’s true of a lot of people. We try to be helpful to them in figuring out how to make that decision, whether they want to sell them or keep them.”
Despite years of collecting, Norfleet said he has never lost interest in coins.
“I just enjoy the hunt, but I’ve always enjoyed going to coin shows and taking a list with me of things that I want and looking for them,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t find what you are looking for. But a lot of times, you’ll find something.”
For more information about coins, call Norfleet at (405) 495-4000, email [email protected] or visit
www.brazitocoinsandcollectibles.com.
