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| Autos |
Under the Hood of the Auction
Michael Duffey
01/01/2004
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Prior to this market shift, anyone who restored a car or paid to restore a car did so as a hobbyist; few regarded such efforts as investment decisions, despite the fact that professional restoration at a shop labor rate of $50 an hour could easily top $8,000 a month. Still, a stack of receipts for parts and labor that totaled six figures never resulted in a six-figure car; restoration was a loss leader with only about 50 percent of restoration costs being recouped. But things changed in the 1980s, when Aston Martin values increased tenfold over the course of a single year, and escalating Ferrari prices revved up the collector community’s bidding engines. The Ferrari 250 GTO (a car that might have fetched $75,000 in 1985) would increase in value to more than $10 million by the end of the decade. Such spiraling car values made the restoration industry more viable, and the vice of restorative indulgence a more economically reasonable pastime, expanding the number of freshly minted restorations crossing the auction block from coast to coast. And the automobile auction industry has continued to grow since.
| The provenance of an original, dusty, dented, barn find
inspires more confidence than
a car restored to better than
new condition. |
With this growth, the value and desirability of some of the cars has sidestepped their former mantle as transportation and placed them on the same level as other big-ticket, investment-grade collectibles. In the same way that an original finish can double the value of a 17th-century chair, original, unrestored cars, sometimes literally barn finds, have sold for figures comparable to and sometimes exceeding fully restored items. The provenance of an original, dusty, dented, barn find inspires more confidence than a car restored to better-than-new condition, because the car-collecting world, like those of other high-end collectibles, is dotted with unoriginal cars, clones and bitsas (cars built from parts, or bits), some of these dating back to the Fifties, giving them the look of the genuine article.
Though the industry has expanded in size, it has not always advanced in terms of its sophistication. Far from the stately environs of fiction, the automobile auction can more closely resemble a livestock sale at the county fair. Auctioneers occasionally drive the vehicles across the platform, immersing the audience in a miasma of carbon monoxide, or arrange them in the sorts of static displays to be found at used car lots. The catalogs of the sales’ contents, at their best, are glossily printed tomes, often colorful, often wordy, but seldom terribly informative as to the historical significance of the lots or their true condition.
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