Highlights
- $122.4M in Q4 tracked sales; $524.8M for full-year 2024.
- Mahomes 2017 Immaculate RPA /99 sale ($4.3M, October) was the year's defining modern-cards moment.
- Action Comics #1 CGC 9.0 ($6M, April) reset the Golden Age ceiling.
- Movie/TV memorabilia closed +22% YoY — the year's strongest category.
- Modern cards returned to growth after two flat-to-down years.
What 2024 actually looked like
2024 was the year the memorabilia market returned to growth. After 2023's correction — which was concentrated in modern cards but produced broader skepticism about the category — 2024 posted $524.8M in tracked sales, up 7.7% from 2023's $487.2M. The recovery was uneven: movie/TV memorabilia surged (+22% YoY), modern cards stabilized (+3% YoY off a low 2023 base), comics held (+9% YoY), and only autographs as a standalone category contracted (-2% YoY).
The defining 2024 sales:
The Mahomes RPA at Goldin in October ($4.3M). Established the apex modern football card price tier. With Mahomes signed through 2031 and producing on a generational trajectory, the sale was an investment in continued cultural significance, not just a 2024 valuation.
Action Comics #1 CGC 9.0 at Heritage in April ($6M). Reset the Golden Age ceiling. The previous CGC 9.0 sale was $3.21M in 2014. The 2024 sale, at the same grade, was 1.87x the inflation-adjusted equivalent.
The Ruby Slippers at Heritage in December ($32.5M). Single-event sale that ended the year on a record-setting note for movie props. The FBI-recovery provenance was the distinguishing feature; the dollar value reset the entire screen-used-prop conversation.
The 1955 Topps Clemente at Heritage in May ($138K). Less headline-grabbing but more market-instructive. Showed that vintage-card mid-tier sales had stabilized at the new (lower than 2022) price band.
The full-year totals
| Category | 2024 tracked | YoY change | vs. 2022 peak |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trading cards | $184.3M | +3% | -31% |
| Sports memorabilia | $85.0M | +6% | -18% |
| Movie/TV memorabilia | $79.4M | +22% | +9% |
| Comics | $70.2M | +9% | -14% |
| Music memorabilia | $40.3M | +5% | -8% |
| Political/historical | $29.3M | +11% | +6% |
| Autographs (standalone) | $29.3M | -2% | -22% |
| Toys | $4.9M | +8% | -12% |
The "vs. 2022 peak" column is instructive. Movie/TV memorabilia, political/historical, and (to a lesser extent) music are the three categories now above their 2022 peaks. Everything else — including the trading cards segment that drove the 2020–2022 surge — remains below peak. The broad memorabilia market is not back to 2022; it has rotated into different sub-categories.
What the rotation says
Three structural readings of the 2022-to-2024 rotation:
Modern cards over-extended; movie props caught up. In 2022, modern cards were 41% of tracked total. In 2024, they were 36%. Movie/TV was 12% in 2022; 15% in 2024. That rotation is partly the modern-card correction and partly the maturation of Propstore as a serious auction house with the catalog depth to support seven-figure sales repeatedly.
Political/historical is the quiet structural winner. The category posted +11% in 2024 and now sits +6% above its 2022 level. The drivers — Founding Era institutional collecting, estate-driven consignment, documented provenance premium — are structural rather than cyclical, and we expect outperformance to continue.
The standalone autograph category is migrating into other categories. Autographs attached to game-worn equipment, instruments, or screen-used props are counted in those parent categories. The standalone autograph category — signed photos, signed albums where the album is not a major release — is the long-tail that contracted in 2024. The migration is healthy: items with multiple value drivers (game use + autograph; instrument + autograph; prop + autograph) command premiums that the autograph alone would not.
The 2025 setup
The setup heading into 2025 has three components worth noting:
Inventory pipeline. Auction houses report deeper consignment pipelines than at any point since 2022. Boomer-driven estate consignment is the structural supply driver. The grading-service capacity constraint is the operative gating factor: items in queue today are 2026 auction lots.
Buyer cohort breadth. The cross-category modern buyer cohort continues to expand. We tracked notable new entrants — corporate collectors, family-office buyers, regional institutional collectors — across multiple categories in Q4. The breadth supports the higher prices but also concentrates power on the buy side.
Documentation premium widening. Items with verifiable chain-of-custody pulled away from COA-alone equivalents in Q4. We expect this trend to continue into 2025, with implications for consignment economics and authentication-service positioning.
Methodology note
Tracked sales above the Field Index threshold are sourced from public auction-house catalogs, trade-press reporting, and grading-service population data.