Prices of second hand lenses

Has anybody else noticed that the second hand prices of older manual focus lenses are rising quite sharply lately. I have a couple of rather beaten up Nikon shift lenses I bought cheaply on Ebay some years ago to try my hand at architectural photography, with the right gear. I was looking to replace then with better copies, as I like the Nikkor 28mm PC and 35mm PC very much. They are still optically quite good. But a couple of years ago like a lot of Ai glass they could be sourced very cheaply. Now in some cases the prices of old glass has almost doubled. I see the same trend with old film cameras too.

I have a local dealer, with a strong online presence, who changes his online storefront every other day with the latest SH gear he has to offer. There seems to be a very strong market for old analogue age gear developing, as a lot of stuff that a couple of years ago, nobody wanted, gets marked as "sold", just hours after going on sale.

Is it time to offload my old darkroom gear? Looks like I was too early with my disposal of my old Nikon/Mamiya and 5x4 analogue gear.

(I’m almost exclusively using old enlarging- repro- and industrial lenses and there are at least 5 documented cases where people who asked about the lenses I shoot with reported to have bought one or two enlarging lenses afterwards! So I guess: case closed! 😉)

I have no real explanation unfortunately, but it seems to vary a lot. Some (lesser known) lenses got even cheaper while the price of others increased significantly.

I found it some 14 years ago.

At that time when I bought Panasonic G1, the M43 lens profile was very limited, only 2 native lenses at that time, the 14-45 & 45-200 offering EFL of 28-400. There was lack of fast speed lenses and others.

I had the Nikon ais 28 f/2.8 and 50 f/1.8. Happily adapted them by a <US$10 dummy ais->M43 adapter. I understood those vintage ais MF lenses were dirt cheap, I looked for some fast speed macro and tele lenses but realized that they were at least 40~50% more expensive than I originally expected. Reason: appearing of mirrorless ILC.

Now as CaNikon enters the mirrorless game, I expect the new demand could further push up the prices of vintage lenses.