value of pipe organ

[lpzandt]

my family has an old house pipe organ. it has been build appr.early 17th century and has recently totally been restored. it has wooden and lead pipes.
we are looking for a price estimate/value of this organ. does anyone know who to contact / where to find an estimate of its value?
for exact details of the organ and pictures pls contact me on l.zandt@chello.nl or in this forum.

[mirjam]

Wow, you are really lucky to own an instrument like that!
It is impossible to tell the value of such an item unless you're an expert. Why don't you ask the person who restored it? Or contact an organ builder in Holland. You could check the following site, whre you'll be able to get in contact with the right people or advertise.
http://www.orgelbouwers.nl/
Good luck!

[D P Werner]

Whoever did your restoration should be able to help with valuing the instrument. There's www.organclearinghouse.com. They are very US-centric but might give you some ideas. Old pipe organs, even very old ones, on the whole have surprisingly little resale value.

I would say these are main criteria for value:
- How well can the history of the instrument be documented
- Who built it
- The less it's been altered over time the more potentially valuable it is. This is related to the first point. Restoring a modified organ to its supposed original state is not nearly as valuable as it not having been altered in the first place.
- Old organs are of more historical interest than monetary value. The irony is that the organ is perceived to be more valuable if it remains in its original location. Move it somewhere else and it's not quite as historically interesting.

[champion]

This is indeed a burning question with various Churches in India having British built pipe organs. We have no organ builder in India and those "surviving" repairers can barely address only the tracker & pneumatic actions so that the pipes which are still speaking continue to peal. In fact one church from Mussourie in North India ask me the value of their pipe organ some 20 years back (when I was much less knowledgeable)
Good luck

[Nadav]

on the the other hand the tradition of REED organ lives in india and in india alone.
in my last visit to dharamshala (himachal pradesh)i bought
a punjabi reed organ that was anfurtunately too small to play western classical music and without pedal.
i allso noticed that being a hill station there was an english
church with large reed organ (foot pumped) that needs some VERY
extencive repair . hupefully they will start build western style instruments for export an tourists soon. i would be glad to buy one

[harfo32]

There are ways to make money on a large scale, but organ building is not one of them! I appreciate this is not a direct reply to the original poster's question, but the "value" of a pipe organ is, in some ways, incalculable.
Different industries have different profit margins,though there is usuallly some uniformity within a given industry.
Supermarkets, for example, work on a fairly low profit margin, e.g.10 to 12 %, but make large profits from high volume sales. An organ building firm is in a different ball park. As a one time Director of the British firm of Grant Degens and Bradbeer I have a working knowledge of the sums involved. I have also researched the balance sheets of some other organ building companies. Some are better off than others, but all work on limited reserves, and without a healthy order book would have a short life.
It is hard to precisely predict the future, but there is a limited market for new organs and the future seems to lie with the small firms of skilled craftsmen, with low overheads and flexibility. Thus organ building is by way of being a vocation
rather than a business, the classic economic definition of which is an organisation designed to maximise profits.
The actual costs of building an organ are the materials for the
pipes, soundboards, action and console. To this must be added the cost of labour - though organ building does not offer large rewards financially - and it is not a labout intensive industry in the sense of employing a large percentage of the workforce. However, the construction costs of individual organs is mainly that of skilled labour! There are factory overheads - premises, running expenses, office staff etc. But continued existence is dependent on cash flow from new work and contract payments, which depends on satisfied customers and reasonably competitive prices.
So pipe organ building is a vocation, and the value of an instrument, a bit like art, is what people will pay for it!
If it is a unique artefact of historical importance it will be worth more than an a collection of pipes attached to a console. These may cost as much to remove and repair as a new organ, and be of little artistic worth at the end of the day. On the other hand, sometimes organs of real interest come on to the market due to churches closing - for example the pipework from a "Father" Willis organ in London dating back to 1857, was recently moved and installed in a church in Burnt Oak, (St Alphage's) another suburb of London. But the action, framework and case were all new. Only the Pipes were used - carefully restored. The organ has tracker action. (see photo) It was considerably less expensive than an all new organ, and probably better than many!
John Foss