By Van Mitchell, staff writer
Bill Norfleet has been collecting coins for years, and after retiring, he took his collecting to the next level by opening his business 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.”
Norfleet sells/buying at coin shows, sells coins online, and meets with individuals by appointment only at his Oklahoma City office location.
“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.
“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.” Norfleet said there are still larger coin shows that attract buyers/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.”
Norfleet said to help better attendance at the Oklahoma coin shows, he is using email to help 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 like the Professional Coin Grading Organization (PCGS) or Numismatic Guarantee Company (NGC).
A coin that has been certified will come in a tamper-evident encapsulation or slab from the organization that certified and graded it. This slab will have 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.
Norfleet said coin collectors have a wide variety of coin interests.
“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 said he receives phone calls from people who are interested in selling their coins and inquiring about what they might be appraised at.
“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.”
Norfleet said he has never lost interest in collecting 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 brazitocoinsandcollectibles.com.
