Music plays on for record company

 

The first thing you notice when you visit the house Matt Oehmen and Pat McNally share is the furniture on the front yard: two comfy-looking chairs in the middle of the lawn and two sofas stacked one atop the other in the driveway.

 

A single record, screwed to the brick wall of the bungalow, hints at their shared passion.

 

They are not packrats; the furniture, it turns out, is from last week’s garage sale. But the single record is just one of the 5,000-plus vinyl records they have in their collection.

 

Oehmen, 23, and McNally, 26, are the proud owners of Honest Red’s Records+, a website advertised as “EBay’s Home of Classic Music, Rarities, Collectibles and More!”

 

The two men started the business a year and half ago, operating out of their basement, or what McNally calls the “record vault.” Both music fans from an early age, the two started selling records from their own, much smaller collection before they began to scour thrift stores and garage sales for more vinyl.

 

The secret to their success, Oehmen says, was often about “finding the right old men.” “People just want to unload their records,” he says. “I mean, they’re hard to sell. We’d just buy a bunch and sit there and sort through a thousand before we’d find a few that looked rare enough to be valuable.”

 

Their confidence got a boost when they received the 2008 Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award from EBay after submitting an essay about themselves and a rare Beatles’ record they found, worth between $1,000 and $2,000.

 

Today, despite the economic downturn, sales are brisk, with buyers from as far away as Russia, South Korea, France and Australia.

 

Down in the record vault they tell me how they met in their college years through a mutual friend in Halifax, where Oehmen worked at a record store and McNally at a Salvation Army thrift store. They moved to Ottawa a year and a half ago and now work full time running Honest Red’s.

 

Before I leave they show me some of their more interesting records: Celine Dion’s first album, recorded when she was 13 years old and now worth between $500 and $600; a rare John Coltrane record worth $400, and a 1972 David Fanshawe choral album, African Sanctus, which plays in the background as we talk.

 

When asked why he thinks sales are doing so well despite hard economic times, McNally says it’s because vinyl records are more than a luxury.

 

“They’re getting rare . . . they’re older. Records are cool because they’re big and graphic and you have something to look at. They’re works of art. When you buy a record, you’re actually getting something.”

 

James Boyd, the co-owner of Compact Music on Bank Street, who’s been in the music business for 30 years, agrees that vinyl records are special and says sales are usually insulated from economic recessions.

 

“Records are not big ticket items,” he says. “People can stay at home and entertain themselves during bad economic times.”