What do you think about letting owner keep any finds they want?

abbynormal said:

I received permission to detect at a place that attracted huge amounts of people for over 100 years. It has an old hotel and plenty of grounds where picnics, etc. were held, but is not a public park. It is all privately owned by a corporation.

The catch is I am supposed to show the owner/manager everything that I find at the end of each day detecting there so he can keep whatever he wants.

Would does everybody here think? It seems like a great place. Go for it?

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I have shared or given people who give me permission to hunt their land... He could have told you no you can't hunt if you don't share...

Does the manager own the place?? Are they keeping them for display or for themselves.. If its the latter and the manager is not the owner and just an employee I wouldnt let him have a pick of the lot.. The owner on the other hand now thats a different story

abbynormal said:

I received permission to detect at a place that attracted huge amounts of people for over 100 years. It has an old hotel and plenty of grounds where picnics, etc. were held, but is not a public park. It is all privately owned by a corporation.

The catch is I am supposed to show the owner/manager everything that I find at the end of each day detecting there so he can keep whatever he wants.

Would does everybody here think? It seems like a great place. Go for it?

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If you can't hunt it, you won't find anything anyways. Wouldn't bother me. I know I check CL for detectors and there was someone on there willing to pay to hunt large tracts of land and split finds. Makes sense out here, since the parks have been hammered to death. Only time you can hit silver is after a rain and get a small blip over 12" deep. Once the sandy soil dries out in a day or two it's over.

Jay_781 said:

Does the manager own the place?? Are they keeping them for display or for themselves.. If its the latter and the manager is not the owner and just an employee I wouldnt let him have a pick of the lot.. The owner on the other hand now thats a different story

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This gentleman is the main owner - it's a small corporation. They do have a little "museum" of sorts with artifacts, so they might want some of the items for that. I'm not really sure. He didn't seem to want to talk a long time, but they were busy at the time.

I guess you guys are correct as usual- it's better than not detecting there at all. They said no one has ever detected there before and they have found interesting things just in the course of their groundskeeping. He showed me where everyone used to picnic in the early 1900s.. He asked me to come back next weekend because today they had a ton of people there on account of the holiday.

I have turned over finds to owners before, but no one has asked to see *everything every day* before I leave. But hey, it should be a great place to detect!

Cfmct said:

I have shared or given people who give me permission to hunt their land... He could have told you no you can't hunt if you don't share...

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X2..
Owner picked the one store token I dug that had a value of $160...
But I found many other items that I otherwise never would have been able to add to my collection & now I have his trust & permission to go back anytime..

I'd be happy with whatever they let me keep, and just pictures of what the kept. Nothing beats digging the stuff up. Owning it, is nice too, but not as much as that initial thrill when you found it, something hard to share. If the place is in heavy use, and has been for over 100 years, never detected. Would be a great place to explore, and you get to be the first. Even if they take all the best stuff, you should still have tons of great stuff. If you don't like the way the first day turns out (they want it all), you don't have to keep going back. They would hunt it themselves, if that greedy, doubt they will take much of anything. Would clean anything in the field, anymore than you need to identify the target. Dirty objects are less appealing. Would be completely honest about it, you agree to everything, stick to it, if you want to keep going back

i am all for sharing but let's say you find 2 gold rings, a Morgan, a couple silver quarters and some clad. Then according to your terms (he keeps whatever he wants) let's say he says he keeps the rings and all the silver and you get the clad Not good.
I would say, I would agree that we "share" the finds by alternate selection, he/she can pick first and so on. I also would agree that any relic relative to the site that he can have.
What if you find a cache of coins or something? I would suggest a split of any cache.
Heck, you're providing the expertise and doing all the work.
I think that is reasonable.
Just my 2 cents.

Roger B said:

i am all for sharing but let's say you find 2 gold rings, a Morgan, a couple silver quarters and some clad. Then according to your terms (he keeps whatever he wants) let's say he says he keeps the rings and all the silver and you get the clad Not good.
I would say, I would agree that we "share" the finds by alternate selection, he/she can pick first and so on. I also would agree that any relic relative to the site that he can have.
What if you find a cache of coins or something? I would suggest a split of any cache.
Heck, you're providing the expertise and doing all the work.
I think that is reasonable.
Just my 2 cents.

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Maybe he can run across an alternating pick of finds concept? You may get lucky and their first pick isn't what your first pick would have been?

any owner can have any item i show them... I'm just a nice giving guy.

I would have no problem with him keeping whatever he wants...his land, I'm just finding the stuff.

The problem is do you really want to find your first Morgan, or Bust coin, or whatever and have the owner take it? Obviously they would pick the best items to have. So the question is, would it be better to find awesome things just to have them taken away, or to never have found them at all? I guess that's what you have to ask yourself, as only you can answer it. As for myself I'd rather move on to a new spot then spend a day hunting with equipment I purchased only to have the owner take whatever they wanted from my finds. I realize it is their right, but I sometimes wonder if it's better to offer them cash or a gift card to hunt their land with the stipulation that I keep whatever I find. It's obviously a gamble on both our ends but I'd be willing to pay $50 to hunt a potentially good site. If he's already telling you that he want's first dibs on finds, that's a good indication to me that he would take anything good found.

If we agreed before I started detecting, then it would be up to me to make a decision. I know of a couple spots that I'll never get to detect, but if I could I would let the owner keep everything, just for the experience and chance of digging those spots since I know there are some real finds there.

stewart73 said:

I would have no problem with him keeping whatever he wants...his land, I'm just finding the stuff.

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Exactly...

Put the good stuff in your pocket and give him the clad


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Cfmct said:

Exactly...

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Well then, good for you. I took up metal detecting as a hobby for ME but I also am willing to help someone out whenever I can. Like many of you, I have found lost items for people when they've asked and even when they don't ask but I'm not going to use my equipment and spend all day digging for someone else's benefit just for the pleasure of digging.
Now maybe if he was going to donate the finds or put them somewhere for others to enjoy I'd do it.
There is always another site to dig.

Roger B said:

Well then, good for you. I took up metal detecting as a hobby for ME but I also am willing to help someone out whenever I can. Like many of you, I have found lost items for people when they've asked and even when they don't ask but I'm not going to use my equipment and spend all day digging for someone else's benefit just for the pleasure of digging.
There is always another site to dig.

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That is USUALLY my motto too... however, no matter how cool a find is, or how pretty the coin is, I always end up putting it on a shelf to sit there, and then I rarely even look at the stuff again. Even gold rings, platinum, silver etc...

At the end of the day, for ME... it is MORE about the adrenaline rush I get when I first pull a cool find out of the hole than it is about "keeping" the find.

For me it's about the thrill of the hunt, not so much the kill....

If it was somewhere that I'd never get to detect otherwise, then to be able to have the fun of diggin some cool finds, I'd gladly let the owner keep the finds. I mean, what good do they do me sitting on a shelf?

I'd hunt there, as long as I have pictures of everything I find after it's cleaned up, pictures are a thousand words. Sharing is great too! It's just the thrill of the hunt for me.

I like the idea of splitting the finds. This can be done by alternating picks. You can also do the two parts way. One party divides the items into two equal stacks, the other party gets to choose which stack he wants. You can toss a coin or draw straws to see who divides.

What I don't get, is where you chase someone down, convince them to ALLOW you onto THEIR property to hunt, and you are doing them a favor, and entitle to keep everything you want. Once you got them on the hook, you want to change the game, to onesies-twoies, or what ever 'fair way' to split finds. Then there are some, who suggest pocketing all the best stuff, and split the bottle caps and clad.

You asked, the property owner set the terms, why not just except them, or walk away? His land, his rules. If it were my land, I'd change my mind too. He never said he'd actually take anything at all, just reserving the right to pick through the spoils. He can probably afford to buy any coin, bright shiny, new, and clean, real collector value. The melt value, pocket change. Might be cool and interesting, but worth more to you, than the property owner. If he was really that tight and greedy, he tell you to take a walk, and hunt it himself. The stuff he wants, might not be because of the dollar value, but more of the historical nature.

An old, well used, virgin site, and you would over risk losing an operatunity to hunt it, over a few chunks of metal, that you would get anyway, if you never got to hunt there in the first place. No matter what you get to keep, under the owners terms, is going to be a whole lot more than what you had before hunting it in the first place. You still stand to keep much more, than you would find beating the same parks everyone else has been for years.

Now, there are some pretty rich guys out there, who are very tight with a dollar. When I bought my house, the owner of the crappy little apartments next door, was an older man, a retired doctor. Those apartments, use to be his office where he practiced. Old building, always needing repairs, which he, his sons, or somebody who owed a favor, would be doing the work, usually with reclaimed parts and materials. I help occasionally, when him or his wife were there alone, and struggling a little. Gave the doctor rides home, to hardware store, when his wife had their car. The man wasn't poor, he had at least 4 other rental properties, some serious acreage at his home, old farm, private air strip. Yeah, use to own his own plane, and fly. The doctor would pick up pennies off my floor board, or any loose change, slip it in his pocket...