Sell your guns in Troy.

Buying in Troy and Oakland County

Oakland County holds 202 licensed dealers, more than any other county in Michigan.

Those 202 licenses span fifty separate towns and include 48 licensed manufacturers. The estates match the density: Oakland routinely produces the largest and most valuable private collections we’re called out to look at. Oakland is the money, and it changes what an estate looks like. Fifty towns and 202 licenses cover everything from Pontiac to Bloomfield Hills, and the collections at the top end of this county are the ones people travel from other states to buy — matched pairs, engraved doubles, boxed presentation pieces, safes that were bought to hold something specific. It’s also the county where the gap between what a family assumes and what the guns are worth runs widest in both directions.

Roughly a quarter of Oakland County's 202 licenses — 48 of them — are manufacturing licenses. Collections here tend to include at least one gun that somebody worked on rather than bought, and those are the ones worth slowing down over.

With 9 licensed pawnbrokers, this is a county where guns get sold in a hurry. That is worth knowing if you are clearing an estate: the fast route is well worn here and it is not usually the one that pays.

They are spread thin, too: 202 licenses across 50 separate towns with no single hub. Collections were assembled from several small shops over decades, and half of those shops are gone.

What collections look like around here

South-east Michigan holds the densest concentration of licensed dealers in the state — Oakland County alone has 202, Macomb 176 and Wayne 130 — and an unusual number of them are manufacturers, not shops: better than fifty licensed makers in Macomb, and nearly as many in Oakland. That’s a legacy of the tooling trade, and it shows up in private collections. Metro Detroit turns up more precision-made, modified and custom work than anywhere else in Michigan, alongside the ordinary run of hunting guns.

Estates in Oakland County

Metro estates are often the largest we see. A house that has been in a family for fifty years often holds three generations of firearms at once: a grandfather's war-era rifles, a father's deer guns, and whatever the current owner bought in the last decade. Those layers are worth separating properly, because their values are nothing alike and the oldest layer is usually the one no one has looked at.

We also cover Royal Oak, Rochester Hills, Farmington Hills, Waterford, Clarkston and Novi — and the rest of Michigan besides. If you have something worth looking at, distance is our problem, not yours.

This is a bigger collection than we can describe on the phone.

Oakland County produces the largest private collections we’re called to, which is unsurprising given it holds 202 licensed dealers across fifty towns. A list helps if one exists, and if it doesn’t, that’s entirely normal — cataloguing it’s the work, not a prerequisite for asking.

Where to go next

Settling an estate ·Selling your own collection ·Closing a shop ·What sets the price ·You inherited firearms

One thing worth knowing before anyone looks at it, wherever you are: don’t clean it. A polished or re-blued gun can be worth a fraction of an untouched one, and it can’t be undone.