pvgtX2
GT Owner
I was at Barrett-Jackson again this year, as I am every year. My opinion has not changed; great place to visit, but I wouldn't buy a car there.
The question of why one would buy a car at auction where other examples of the same car can be found for less or equal money from a dealer is an interesting one. I have puzzled over this for the last few years. Here's what I've come up:
1. Convenience. Some folks like the efficiency of showing up on the Gulfstream and just buying stuff on what some of us more careful people would call "impulse". For these folks, a few extra thousand here and there is a fair trade for the time it would otherwise take to shop for cars in the more traditional sense.
2. The Sportfishing mentality: These guys don't want to catch a fish from a quiet pond (the reputable dealer route), they want to brave the seas of high adventure and buy a car in the rough and tumble of the auction environment. They see it as a competition to a) find the right car among a mass of candidates and 2) beat others for the purchase on the field of battle.
Again, a surplus of money and boredom probably explain a lot of this.
3. The Only Access Theory. There are some occasions where a particular car is, for some reason, especially desirable to a buyer, and the only avenue to purchase it is at the auction. In a case where an asset or collection is being liquidated by an institution or fiduciary, a major auction is a pretty safe place to sell if one is trying to assure an asset is sold at "fair market value". In these rare cases, if a buyer wants the ONE car, he may have no choice but to brave the alcohol induced haze of the big tent auction.
As for me, if I want another GT, i'll call Shelby Smith.
Very well stated. I would add that during stable economic conditions, a car like the GT is basically like a commodity. The supply of cars for sale at any given time does go up and down but is generally in a range where the real value of the car can be determined +/- 10%. For me the biggest downside to purchasing a car at auction is the inability to do the PPI with as much ease as I would like. There is a certain category of vehicles that may be well bought at an auction like BJ, particularly older restorations especially non-reserve cars. I saw a few cars (mostly mopars) early in the BJ 2013 auction at Pebble Beach that went for significantly less than the expected. I wasn't interested in any of them, but a dealer next to me bought a couple for what he believed to be a huge discount. It seemed strange too that non reserve cars were crossing the block in the first hour of the auction when the room was fairly empty.
