Hagerty’s Kenneth Ahn and Brian Rabold join TheStreet’s James Ochoa to discuss the growing popularity of the classic car market.
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00:00Compared to before the pandemic, how has the state of the classic and collector car market has, how much has it grown over the years of the prior?
00:11The pandemic really fueled a huge boom in the collector car market. Prior to the pandemic, things were pretty steady but not very active.
00:21They were coming off of a big market cycle that peaked in 2015.
00:26With the pandemic, a lot of, for a number of reasons, all of a sudden the collector car market just took off.
00:32We saw prices doubling year over year for a number of cars that took probably about 18 months.
00:39And then about 2022, in the summer of 2022, the market started to contract a little bit and slow down.
00:45Yeah, I think it makes sense during lockdowns where you had more time to work on your cars, to think about the cars that you've always wanted.
00:55And driving was one of those things where you could actually do it in a non-social setting and be in a car in a safe sort of environment.
01:01What that created was a really interesting phenomenon with respect to buying and selling cars through digital means.
01:09With the online auctions, typically it was Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace and generally lower valued cars, primarily local and within driving distance.
01:21All of a sudden, it was the only way to transact.
01:25And so not only were people getting more and more comfortable with buying cars in the five, even six-figure, rarely even seven-figure cars, but also a lot of the businesses adapted.
01:36And so rather than having one or two or five photographs, 100 photos and images and sellers putting a video.
01:44So we did see COVID not only change during that time, the valuations changed quite a bit, but also the ways in which people buy and sell cars.
01:53Whereas if you have the comfort of your home and looking at your computer screen, it's less intimidating, I think, and more accessible.
02:00So I think that's gotten a lot of the newer generation and younger generation of enthusiasts coming in.
02:06Brian, anything?
02:07I totally agree, Ken.
02:09And I think the other thing is it makes it a lot easier to discover these cars.
02:13There are so many more cars transacting.
02:15It's constant, so it's easy to pop in, see what's going on.
02:19A lot of these sites have alerts that you can set up so that if a car you're interested comes up for sale, you can get on it.
02:26And the number of pictures really increases the confidence and the community that surrounds a lot of these sales where you can follow a car, you can learn about it, you can learn the right questions to ask, makes you a more educated buyer.
02:39So I think it's just helped bring a lot more people into the car buying space.