Posted By:
Eric BrehmI would guess that you would get a higher return selling the cards individually rather than as a single lot, if you are willing to do the work to find all the individual buyers. Hank Aaron cards are certainly in demand, but are relatively easy to find, so I wouldn't think many buyers would be willing to pay a premium to have the work of set assembly already done for them. And while there are some collectors who are interested in acquiring a complete run of Aaron's cards (as indicated for example by the number of Aaron sets that are currently listed on the PSA set registry), there are probably many more who are only interested in certain ones, for example if they need his card to complete a Topps set from a year in which Aaron appeared. In this case, I would say you basically have a 'wholesale' item that is best sold in a 'retail' fashion.
I know that some of the auction houses have recently offered sets, mostly of older and scarcer material, where they allow bidders to bid either on individual cards or on the whole set. The set is then awarded to the highest bidder on the whole set only if their bid exceeds the sum of the highest bids on the individual cards. I haven't tracked these particular auctions so I don't know how this has typically come out.