Tips For Buying A Used Piano

When you buy a piano privately, you are going to get all the dirt and dust that a typical second-hand piano accumulates in its lifetime – no-one cleans out a piano when they are going to sell it.  You will also have to pay for removal of the piano as well as a tuning and possible remedial work as well.

This is true for any private sale whether from a friend or relative, a classified advertisement in the local paper or online, an auction house or on an online auction site.

Buying from a friend or relative

Unless your friend or relative is a piano technician, assume they know as much about pianos as you do.

We are regularly offered pianos ‘in perfect condition’ which the vendor then qualifies by admitting the instrument has been in the garage for at least five years, hasn't been tuned since the old King died, has a missing castor, a broken pedal, several non-working keys, some of the ivory missing, oh yes, ‘and my son painted it purple when he was respraying his bike’!  But otherwise it’s perfect.  And valuable because it’s old.

Sadly, most of these pianos have no value except to the local Rotary Club around November 5th.

If you are considering buying or accepting a piano from a friend or relative it might be politic to suggest they offer the instrument to a local piano retailer first to see if the instrument has any value.  (I know I shall be castigated in the trade for that suggestion as most retailers will not take the time to explain why an instrument is has little or no value, but it is something I do.)

And before you make a decision to buy or accept the piano spend a little money and have a piano technician look at it first and check the tuning pins, action and other working parts.  We've taken a couple of pianos in part-exchange with missing strings where a tuner broke one or two and never replaced them.  The owner hadn't noticed.  Not a problem for us, but it’s not an expense you want to inherit if you can avoid it.

A chap arrived at our showroom a couple of days ago with the action from his newly-gifted piano in the back of his car.  He wanted to know how much it would cost to repair.  We looked at the five broken hammer shanks (the hammers had long gone missing), the flanges that were coming unstuck again (we could see the screws where someone had tried a repair in the past and had split the wood in the process), the broken springs and all the rest and gently told the man that he’d be wasting any money he spent on the piano.  I’m sure his friend meant well when he gifted the piano, but I also feel it was a convenient way to dispose of an instrument no-one would buy and he wasn't prepared to pay for its removal or disposal.

We once acquired a fairly new white grand piano that had been in a garage for about a year.  When we pulled the action out every single one of the hammers had mice teeth marks and the action was covered in white fluff where the rodents had systematically chewed the felt away.  We had to replace all the hammers – and vacuum all the mice droppings out from under the keys!

If you can play, then make sure you try the piano as well.

Buying from a classified advertisement

Since it has now become almost impossible to offload unwanted pianos on the local church, school or old peoples’ home (because they all have digital instruments these days) many people resort to ads in local papers, supermarkets or online.

The same caveats apply to these pianos as to the ones offered by friends or relatives especially as sometimes people have ‘inherited’ a piano with the house they've just bought as the previous owners left it behind because they didn't want it!  Try the piano, have a technician check it out and give you a report on its current condition and the cost of getting it into good playing condition.

There are two websites that I know of – craigslist.com and gumtree.com – that offer goods for sale from both private sellers and traders in the form of classified ads.
All that I stated about buying from an online auction site applies to these sites, the only difference being that goods are offered for a fixed price rather than on auction.  eBay owns Gumtree, by the way.

Buying from an auction house

If a piano is in a general furniture sale at an auction house it’s possibly come from an estate and is being sold as part of a house clearance.  If it was a top quality instrument it probably would have been offered to a specialist auction house or directly to a dealer as house clearance companies tend to do that.  Private sellers may not bother, although we do get calls asking about the value of estate pianos.  So, the chance of a piano in auction being a ‘find’ is unlikely but you may find something that would suit your purpose even if it isn’t the finest example of the piano makers’ art.

Once again pay a technician to check over your prospective purchase before you get carried away in the bidding and be guided by him as to the price you should pay.  Don’t forget that there is a buyers’ premium on auction bids which can add up to a further 25% to the bid price.  There is no warranty of any kind attached to items sold at auction, and auctioneers do not accept ‘buyer’s remorse’ as a reason to refund your money should the instrument not turn out to be what you expected.
And you have to pay for removal.

We had a client (who had bought from us in the past) who was looking for a specific make of piano and thought he could get a better deal by buying at auction than from us.  He paid a couple of thousand (plus premium and transport) for a piano which we were then asked to go and fix!  It cost nearly another thousand to get the piano up and running, but it’s not a good example of the make – which is why I’m not naming it!  He thought he knew about pianos and couldn't make a mistake by buying this particular brand.  Unfortunately, even with the best makes, pianos that are 100 years old or more cannot be assumed to be as robust as they once were and he ended up with one that we certainly wouldn't have advised he bid on.