Car collectors flock to online ‘showroom’
Roger Falcione has always had a love for cars, although he was never very good tinkering with them. “I’m actually all thumbs,” he said with a chuckle. “But I’ve always loved the cars since I was young. I especially loved the classic cars.”
Years later, Falcione was able to translate that love into a successful business that matches car buyers with sellers.
He operates under classiccars.com, an international website that sees about 3 million visitors a month with some 7 million searches.
“Basically, the whole mission of the company and the website is to help buyers and sellers and owners of classic cars interact with each other,” he said. “We have a very active marketplace.”
Because it’s a specialty niche, the website has proven particularly adept at helping buyers find just right the car, while helping sellers attract buyers from outside the area in which they live.
Even a number of classic-car dealerships are affiliated with the site, although Falcione said he has yet to attract a New Mexico dealership.
“We have about 30,000 cars in our online inventory,” he said. “Individual sellers and a group of about 500 classic-car dealers who also advertise cars on our site.”
Falcione first moved into internet business in the mid-1990s, buying such domain names as classiccars.com and musclecars. com, but it wasn’t until a decade later that he decided to do something with it.
“I wanted to do so something that I was really passionate about and that’s what drove me to do it,” he said. “In 2006, I assembled a team to start the actual building of the site and went live in 2007. In turned out the timing wasn’t exactly optimal. Sometimes things don’t go as planned. But we managed to grow throughout that period and really grow some great relationships with dealers and sellers through that difficult time. So in a lot ways it actually helped.”
Since many of the sellers fall into an older demographic, Falcione said one of the important areas of service is helping develop the right way to present a car for sale.
“We talk to every single person that sells a car on our site, number one, to make sure it’s not a scam,” he said. “We have an excellent record as far as that is concerned. Then we give people suggestions. We allow up to 100 photos so we advise them; for instance, if the lighting isn’t right. That helps them quite a bit.”
The site has featured all kinds of vehicles, with some of the most popular being Ferraris or specialty vehicles like the Batmobile or other pop culture-type of cars.
“Anything with a low production is exciting to see and read about,” Falcione said. “It stirs a lot of excitement.”