A California real estate agent, while cleaning out his late father-in-law’s former home in Los Angeles, made an incredible million-pence find.
John Reyes and his wife Elizabeth found the pennies last year in a crawl space in the basement of her late father Fritz’s home in the city’s Pico-Union neighborhood.
The family spent a year clearing out the house, which housed decades’ worth of belongings, before making the discovery, Reyes told DailyMail.com.
After struggling to find a bank willing to exchange them for cash, he was urged by a manager to investigate whether he had a stash of rare pennies worth more than their dollar value.
Reyes has now listed the coins on OfferUp, a popular resale app and website, asking for $25,000 – more than double the value of $10,000 in regular currency. “Someone can buy them and they can go penny hunting,” he said.
Reyes has now listed the coins on OfferUp, a popular resale app and website, asking $25,000
Real estate agent John Reyes made the discovery while clearing out his late father-in-law’s former home in Los Angeles, California
Rare coins can make a coin. Last month, a coin expert revealed that the most valuable pieces he’s ever sold at auction are a $12 million silver dollar and a set of Lincoln tokens that fetched $7.7 million.
Reyes has had patchy offers, but is waiting for someone to take them completely off her hands.
Fritz and his brother, who were both German immigrants, lived in the house for decades until he passed away and his brother left.
Reyes told DailyMail.com how he’s certain Fritz kept the coins because of their copper value.
In the 1980s, the US Mint anticipated an increase in the price of copper and so switched to making coins from zinc to save money.
‘The moment my father-in-law knew they were switching to zinc, he would have started to cash in. That’s just the kind of guy he was,” Reyes said.
“He never told us they were there, but he always said when his time came, we should make sure we went through the house and took our time. So at least he gave some hints about some things!’
Reyes said the family left the basement to the last when cleaning up the house because everyone was hesitant to go there and it was “full of cobwebs.”
The house was on a raised foundation, he said, with a crawl space below filled with heavy objects.
When he pulled a heavy carpet from the crawl space, he made the discovery.
In the 1980s, the US Mint anticipated an increase in the price of copper and so switched to making coins from zinc
Reyes said he is certain his father-in-law would have kept the coins because of their copper value
“Then I saw some rolls of pennies,” he said. “And as I started moving more stuff, I found boxes of pennies and then crates of pennies.”
These crates were so heavy that it took them half a day to put them on the floor, but underneath they also found old bank bags full of coins.
Some of the bags were even sealed by the banks – a handful don’t even exist anymore.
“Coin experts have told me not to open the bags because they are valuable themselves,” he told DailyMail.com.
After making the discovery, the family thought they would just cash out and be done with it.
“When I called banks in LA, no one would take them. I thought it would be easy and I would just bring in a few wheelbarrows at a time,” said Reyes.
A branch in Wells Fargo said they couldn’t accommodate them because it wouldn’t fit in the vault.
Their local bank in Ontario, California, wouldn’t take the pennies either, urging Reyes and his extended family to sift through them and search for rarities.
“The value is in the uniqueness,” Reyes said KTLAadding that taking less than their full worth goes against his father-in-law’s ideals.
