'The Price of Everything' documentary deserves a better review; Venus Over Manhattan pops into San Francisco

This commentary by Marion Maneker is available to AMMpro subscribers. (The first month of AMMpro is free and subscribers are welcome to sign up for the first month and cancel before they are billed.)

The Classic Car Market Moves Toward the Middle

A trend that has been visible in the fine art market emerged as a defining feature of the classic car market after the 10-day round of sales held in Arizona last week. The overall sales volume recorded by Hagerty was $251m against the previous year’s $248m. Hagerty had projected slightly higher sales but there was a bit of buyer’s strike at the top end of the market with several of the most highly estimated cars failing to find buyers or convince sellers to compromise on their expectations.

Cars valued above $1m had 48% sell-through rate, normally that’s closer to 60%. According to Hagerty, cars below $250,000 “posted the strongest prices compared with current market values. This phenomenon helped push the medium sales price from $40,700 a year ago to $47,300 this year.”

• Of the 3,294 vehicles offered up for bidding, 2,660 sold. That’s an 81 percent sell-through race, a slight decrease from the 84 percent figure for 2018.

One classic car site quoted the Hagerty experts this way:

• “There are clearly two distinct and separate markets in effect,” said Dave Kinney, publisher of the Hagerty Price Guide. “Distilled down, big-dollar players are sitting on their hands while the most accessible vehicles are attracting all the bidding.”
• “The split in the market is apparent in measures like share of vehicles bid above Hagerty Price Guide values,” Hagerty’s news release added. “For offerings below $250k, the share more than doubled from 15 percent on average in 2018 to over 34 percent in 2019.” However, “The opposite happened for offerings above $250k, with the share falling from 33 percent to 17 percent in 2019.”