First, an amusing anecdote: I was once at a yard sale where the seller had carefully sorted all the Legos by color into different tubs. Can't imagine how long that took. She was a little appalled when I bought them all and proceeded to dump them into one large box to load into my car. Anyway...
Buying Legos: For a decent mixed lot of Legos, I usually figure they are worth $5/lb. This assumes that Legos figures, known as minifigs, from the kits are also mixed into the box. The problem, which has been increasing over the last few years, is that kids are KEEPING the minifigs. This decreases the value of a random tub of Legos, and it's not something that's immediately obvious when you're buying it. Especially with character minifigs, like Star Wars, Spider-Man, Batman, Indiana Jones, etc., I can see it being too tempting to keep the minifigs and let the blocks go (when the kid has his eye on that next awesome piece of technology).
Minifigs have kind of hit the pop culture big time. I don't blame anyone for keeping them. It is pretty satisfying to display a minifig Boba Fett or Darth Vader on your shelf. Who needs the blocks? These character minifigs are usually worth $2-3 each. That's some serious demand for a little piece of plastic!
More Lego Strategies: A few years ago, I did really well with a bunch of Legos from a yard sale. I decided, as a test, to take that profit and buy $500 of off-the-shelf Star Wars Lego kits. Two years passed, the kits were all out of production, and I sold those kits for nearly double my money. Not too shabby. Then, since I am nuts, I took that $1000 and bought another batch off off-the-shelf Star Wars Lego kits. They are still in my basement, approaching 1-year old. I'll let you know what happens next year.
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