Have you ever wondered just how many unfinished kit and replicar projects trade hands every year? Maybe someone just ran out of juice (or money) or couldn't find the time to complete their ride and decided to just get rid of it. Basket cases have got to be, at the very least, one of the cornerstones of the car hobby (one man's junk is another man's weekend project, right?).
But when you do finish a project, have your fun with it, and then decide to move onto a new car, what is the best way to get rid of your old one? Of the several methods of "disposal" available to the kit and replicar owner, among the best are found on the Web: www.CollectorCarTraderOnline.com (they even have a replicar/kit car category), www.recycler.com, and, of course, eBay's huge site. The best print publication devoted to determining collectable car values along with a review of car auctions is Sports Car Market magazine-great reading and informative, too.
eBay is interesting because you never know how much a car will sell for until its pre-determined sale period is over. In many respects, it's a lot like attending a car auction, although at a car auction you usually know within a few minutes if you'll be driving home in a new car or not!
Car auctions have been around for as long as cars themselves, but recently something spectacular has been happening at the intersection of car collecting and car auctions. Companies such as Barrett-Jackson have long known the potential to make money by providing a place for car sellers and car buyers to meet, but with the discovery that car auctions are entertaining to watch on TV, the byproduct has been that car auctions have witnessed skyrocketing popularity.
The idea behind most auction com-panies is to create an atmosphere where buyers (sometimes supplied with free liquor-think Las Vegas casinos) get caught up in the moment and then suddenly realize they "have to buy that car!" Some car auction businesses (some of the best are Gooding & Company, Christies, Russo & Steele, Sotheby's, Bonhams, RM, and Kruse International) take a percentage of the sale price from both the buyer and the seller. Some take 8 percent for cars that sell for less than $100,000 and 10 percent for those $100,000 and over. The quick math? They get $20,000 on a car that sold for $100,000: 10 grand from the buyer (so he really pays $110,000 for the car after commissions) and then 10 grand from the seller (who really gets only $90,000 for his car after commissions).
In the past, some sellers have opted to put a reserve price on their cars, which basically amounts to the least amount of money they'd want to sell their car. But because of the popularity of certain car auctions, some companies no longer offer reserve pricing to sellers-basically, if you bring it to sell, it will sell for the highest bid, whatever the amount.
And you can bet that when you roll your reserve-priced car up onto the auction block, there'll be someone in your ear trying to get you to take your car off its reserve, even as the bidding starts. If you do, the auction house's sell ratio (the percentage of its cars that sell) goes up, plus now they're guaranteed their commission fees.
Conversely, if you knew of an auction that had a 99- or 100-percent sell ratio, in other words, 100 percent of the cars brought there were sold, would you feel better about taking your car there? You bet! But the fact that it sold doesn't mean that you sold it for the amount you wanted. It's a roll of the dice, and sometimes people whose cars didn't sell for what they thought they should go away with hurt feelings (especially after the registration fees, hotel and food costs, and travel costs are added up), but other times we've seen a car-owner sheepishly walk away from his pride and joy because it just brought them $25,000 more than he had expected!
It only takes two people in an audience of 1,000 to make you forget about your car, and if one of those two really wants to make the other bidder feel like he's the smaller of the big dogs on the porch, then you will end up, to quote Liberace, "laughing all the way to the bank."
Just about anything will sell at an auction, from little European oddities to well known, multi-million-dollar vehicles. A few years ago, racing legend Phil Hill drove his '62 LeMans-winning Ferrari Testarossa up onto the auction block in Monterey, California, and we watched as two people in the audience continued to raise their hand to the auctioneer until the gavel fell at $5.9 million. Now that's entertainment!
The amount of money flowing in and out of these auctions is just plain staggering. At the 2005 Barrett-Jackson auction (the event is in its 35th year) in Scottsdale, Arizona, there were sales of more than $61.7 million! (BJ's 2006 event in Scottsdale is scheduled for January 17-22). The Russo & Steele auction in Monterey in 2005 garnered $10.6 million-and that was one Friday evening in just five hours!
But you don't need millions to play in the car auction sandbox. Many cars cross the auction block as affordable buys-it's just knowing which cars are worth what, and what someone is willing to pay for it. The following are some examples of both replicars and originals that sold at a few of the auctions held during the crazy week in Monterey surrounding the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance car show, the Concorso Italiano car show, and vintage car racing at Laguna Seca Raceway this past year.