Market overview
Classic car values have managed to buck the trend in this worrying year – at the affordable end of the market at least. So what’s winning, and why? Russ Smith explains all…
In the oddest of odd times, 2020 looks like a bit of a write-off. But there are rays of sunshine. Buyers responded in droves once the auction houses re-grouped and put sales online in various forms. Sell-through rates – usually around 65-70 per cent for an average sale, jumped to more like 80-90 per cent, even with up to – and sometimes more than – 300 vehicles consigned within a sale. This pushed values up too, at least among classics below £25-30k. There are many theories as to why, but first some background.
The boom years, which kicked off around 2008, saw the prices paid for high-end classics rocket. Some of them tripled in value over the next decade – they had become investments more than cars.
But what we are seeing now is a kind of levelling up. Those six- and seven-figure exotics have largely shed some of their gains and continue to do so, though cars that trade for tens of millions are holding steady or rising. Safe investments, but hardly CCW fare. You can draw a line at around £25,000 and below where most real-world classic cars live. Those are largely rising in value and selling strongly at auction, with dealers and via private sellers.
To be fair, that trend started a year or so ago, though in a small way, and it had started to level out. What 2020 has done is energise it and bring it back into sharper focus. Say you’d bought a lovely Morris Minor about 18 months ago for £6750. That very same car today would cost you £7500. Anything that rises in value by more than 11 per cent in that time is something of a miracle, but that kind of number is not unusual among affordable classics.
Everyone has adapted to buying and selling online amazingly quickly, though using a trusted auction house does add a layer of comfort when compared to some older online and auction sites. Also, in those earlier days, and even now to a great extent, transport companies worked hard to keep up with delivering purchases to their new owners.
Dealers have been busy, too. Jonathan Aucott of Avantgarde Classics said: ‘Customers who’d bought from me before were confident enough to buy from my descriptions.’ Meanwhile, Sam Bailey at The SL Shop said: ‘ We have concluded six SL sales with the help of video conferencing.’
Only a fool would try to predict what will happen in 2021, but certainly in the short term I expect the trends outlined here to continue, especially as investment cars keep trickling back on to the market and continue to struggle to find buyers. But this remains a good time to buy for the rest of us. A lot of cars are coming to market, so you might just find that rare gem that you’ve always wanted. And there are still deals to be had.