...and I appreciate all of the interest in keys that you have (and all of the keys you bought from me during the "clearing" awhile back )

Rarity and room keys is a tough issue for a variety of reasons, some of which that come to mind quickly are...

Are ANY room keys TRULY rare? Say there are 200 keys produced for a convention - when compared to the number of "regular issue" keys that are produced of a given design, they would seem exceptionally rare, but...

-If there are only 150 people collecting convention keys from this particular casino, or from this particular physical location (say Tahoe), there are more than enough keys for all of those collectors, but...

-If no one with the collectors interest gets to the casino to obtain any of the keys, then wouldn't you say they are rare?

From another standpoint, say the Palazzo kicks out 100,000 keys of a particular design but they won't hand any out to anyone that is not a guest...and say only 10 of those keys make it to collectors, are they rare? No, there are 100,000 of them out there. Yes, because 999,990 cannot be found by collectors. Which is correct?

What about casinos that are not frequented by collectors? Even regular issues can be difficult to obtain, but does that make them rare?

There are many more questions surrounding the issue, but hopefully this clarifies the negative response I've given to those in the past that have requested I do a price guide for keys. Even if I could answer the questions, it still would be difficult to produce a price guide. The bottom line for me was that you personally had to decide how much any given key was worth to you...and not look back

Jim