Benchmarks: LEGO LOTR and Hobbit

This the third entry in a series of blogs that analyses some of the data we have available here on Brickpicker to provide some simple averages to use as benchmarks. I have done the Star Wars and Ninjago themes and this time it’s the turn of Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit. Technically LOTR and the Hobbit are separate themes but many people lump them under one overall theme and consider each of the two branches a subtheme and that’s what I’ll be doing here.

My aim is to provide some basic stats for the theme mainly around averages for a few simple measures relating to set sizes and value for money metrics. I’m going to leave out investment return measures such as CAGR and the various ROI time periods we have available as I think they should be a different discussion and the fact that current retail sets often muddy the results when looking at theme wide averages.

This information should prove useful in writing other blog articles or set reviews. It also should serve as a benchmark to be able to compare a set against the averages for its theme, which may or may not be useful but the option is there. Over time as I hope to complete more of these blog posts we might also be able to compare themes against each other.

Basic Information

For the LOTR/Hobbit theme I gathered data on 22 sets from Brickpicker set pages. I’m only going to look at US based information in regards to retail price etc.

Of the 22 sets all of them have at least one minifigure. Minifigures obviously rule here! For the Star Wars theme I split the analysis into sets with and without minifigures and for Ninjago I split the sets into two groups: Spinner sets and Other sets. For LOTR/Hobbit I’m going to continue the same methods and split the overall group into the respective LOTR and Hobbit Subthemes. This may help us see if there are any differences between the two and could be useful if you want to compare a one particular set to the averages within each specific subtheme. Totals will give us the overall results for the whole LOTR/Hobbit theme.

I can also tell you that of the 22 sets all of them had a listed retail price. So no need to exclude any from some of the later measures that require a retail price to be present.

It may also be of interest that of the 22 sets there were 21 sets that have had a Brickpicker review written for them (only 10237 Tower of Orthanc is missing one). Of these 21 the average overall review score was 7.50. Surprisingly, the Hobbit sets have a review score average of 7.86 compared to LOTR averaging 7.27, personally I have felt that LOTR sets have been slightly superior to date so that was unexpected.

Pieces

The average piece count per set is 472 pieces. When split by Hobbit and LOTR sets there is a bit of a difference with 336 and 549 average piece counts respectively.

The large piece counts of Helm’s Deep and Tower of Orthanc have really pulled the LOTR average up.

Retail Price

The 22 sets have an overall average of $49.72 for retail price. This is split to $38.74 for Hobbit sets compared to $55.99 for LOTR sets.

Again the larger LOTR sets help pull that average up.

Another interesting piece of information is that of you pay an average of $11.39 per minifigure at retail price.

Price Per Piece (PPP)

Whether you like using PPP as a measure of value for money or not I have included it here as it has become quite a common metric for people to use. Personally I don’t put much stock in it and find it quite a blunt tool.

The overall average for the 22 sets is $0.122 per piece. That seems a little high compared to the conventional benchmark of $0.10 per piece. However, license fees for the theme and the high minifigure count probably push the budget up a bit for this Lego line.

Price Per Gram (PPG)

PPG is in my opinion a better indicator of retail value for money. It takes into account the amount of raw ABS plastic material you get in the box and should be a closer approximation to the cost of production of the set.

For the 22 sets the overall average PPG is $0.093. For Hobbit sets it is $0.104 and for LOTR sets the result is $0.087.

Minifigure Count

In terms of minifigures the average across all 2 sets is a whopping 4.36 minifigures per set. Hobbit sets average 4.00 for and the LOTR sets average 4.57 minifigures per set.

Obviously the LOTR/Hobbit theme relies heavily on minifigures and it will be interesting down the road to see if it tops the theme lists for average minifigures.

Thanks for reading and I hope you find a use for some of these numbers either in your own writing or your own investment decision making.