The average expiry date of Lego technic sets

If there is an excuse to make a spreadsheet then I am all over it, so I thought I would make another, this time I have looked at Lego technic sets, released since 2016 to find out the average expiry date of Lego technic sets is.

This will give us a good understanding when looking at investments about when to snap up the buys hopefully.

As always with statistics there are some exceptions so we shall have a little look at them and the potential pit falls.

The list

You can get this spreadsheet for free here or if your feeling generous a small donation. (Something like 4 pence would be sufficient, Haha!)
 The list also contains all of the current Lego sets with their release date, RRP and the price they would be at 20,30,40 or 50% off. Something to keep in your pocket or on your phone whilst browsing the shops

The average expiry date

From 2016 release dates there are 60 sets that have now retired. I took the release date and date last sold at Lego from brickset.com. Which is an absolute mega resource for anything Lego, I practically live on this site

The average expiry date from all these 60 sets was 656 days.

The vast majority are around this site with the breakdown as follows:

Days Number of sets

>1000 — 1 

800–1000 — 8 

700–800- 22 

600–700 — 8 

500–600 — 10

 300–500 — 11

So between 18 — just over 24 months seem the most common times for retirement. Giving a good indication for the existence of most Lego sets.

The outliers

As always there will be unique sets that the expiry dates will not match up and this can scupper your investments, so it is never a guarantee, if your investing, always be expecting the long term haul. You can get discounted Lego when you know it is retiring but never a guarantee, most of mine are estimates.

Longest set’s expiry date

The longest set in this group was Lego 42095 which was out for 1100 days.

The remote-controlled stunt racer was out for 3 years. 2019–2021.

RRP of £69.99, you could have bought on Amazon for less than £50 at some point during its lifespan, and at £51 in November 2021.

It is now 2 months into expiry and already selling at £95, there will likely be lots of sellers in the short term as well as was on the market for longer

The shortest set expiry date

The shortest was Lego 42104 which was only out for 327 days.

Leaving the market in December 2020. This race truck was RRP at £17.99. Could have picked this up comfortably at £12 during it’s short life span. It is currently selling at £29 on amazon.

Conclusions

Obviously with the investment, each person's circumstances are different and if you can hold for a long time you will probably not be concerned about buying at a great discount in the first 6 months even if it is another 2 years before it expires.

However for me moving forward wanting to turn over investments probably every 2 years I don’t want to keep too much capital in sets not retired yet. Therefore I would probably be using the above information to not seek too many technic sets that have been out for less than a year. Unless there was more information about the retirement date.

Also after a year of it being on the market you will get a good indication of the popularity of the set. One good indicator for me is how quickly it sells once discounted. But there are many others to consider as well

For three Lego technic investments I have got my eyes on check out my post here

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