Sales debate
Is there too much heat in the 911 market currently?
Pay attention to the Porsche marketplace and you’ll have noticed a general inflation of prices for used 911s across the board, from collectibles at the very top, right the way down to the everyday 996 at the bottom.
Whether this consumer confidence is boosted solely by a relaxing of year-long coronavirus restrictions remains to be seen, but there’s no doubting enthusiasts are happy to spend lavishly on acquiring 911s – perhaps best exemplified by the mammoth £7.5 million realised during Collecting Cars’ online sale of ‘The Leonard Collection’. Clearly, a lot of money is sloshing around the Porsche marketplace currently, but is this a good thing?
Jonathan Franklin at the eponymous Porsche specialists is cautious. “It may seem great that prices are going up across the board, but this points to a volatile market,” he says. “If prices of cars go up quickly, they can come down just as quickly too… it’s a gamble from a dealer point of view.”
Franklin’s sentiments are echoed by his industry colleague Karl Meyer of 2911 The Porsche Buyer, who says the market is a hive of activity currently. “It’s a bit like the situation we had a few years back where prices seem to be increasing by the week… people are paying crazy prices for cars, and in some cases those cars are plainly very average. There remains a limited availability of good stock, which in my opinion is contributing to this hike in values and means we are very much in a seller’s market currently,” he confirms. So is the current market trend a worry for consumers? “Not so much for consumers but definitely for dealers, who won’t want to sink their funds into cars which could lose a lot of value when the market goes the other way,” he says.
Both our experts point to 2014-16, when 911 prices boomed, particularly the air-cooled market. This led to a sustained period of gradual price correction, which lasted right up until 2020. While our experts don’t believe the current boom will last as long as the golden years of last decade, they do ultimately believe that we are currently in a bubble, and that bubble is likely to burst before long – a good thing in the long-term stability of 911 values.