No doubt, the market is changing. Some prices are getting stronger while others have settled.
The difference in price between great cars and cars with stories is getting wider.
Great cars continue to be MUCH harder to find than they were a decade ago, especially in the last few years. Generally when guys get ahold of a great car...they just dont sell it on again because they understand how hard it is to find good stuff anymore.
Of course, one can always make the assertion that people who comment on threads like this always have their own hidden motives. I do notice continually that guys who are in the market to buy might harp the doom and gloom stories while the guys with a garage full of cars might laud the market as being "on fire" and spiraling upwards in an out of control fashion.
As someone to makes his living with the cars that I am passionate for..I'm sort of incentive-ized to not say anything on a public forum. If I say the market is strong, those who I want to buy cars from might price them more aggressively to me. If I the market is weak, my potential purchasers might become more timid to paying for a particular car.
The truth is, though, I would give the market a clean bill of health right now. Prices arent increasing at a remarkable rate (they remain strong) but they certainly are not going down for most cars. Cars which are priced appropriately are selling quickly and at or near their all time highs in terms of monetary values. Ive sold 5 65 GT350s this year...only one needed to be publicly advertised and that was only because I had sold it to a client only a month before putting it up for sale again...after I found him a better car to have instead. That car then sold to a buyer in Sweden in a very short time period.
With that said, cars which are priced unreasonably are sitting. The owners will continue to send the checks off to the insurance company while the cars take up 200 sqft in their garage. Potential buyers for these cars continue to get more and more well educated. In result, selling cars for unreasonably high prices when the cars themselves are not remarkable in some respect is much more difficult then it used to be.
I'll re-emphasize over everything else in this post, though, that finding great cars is more difficult now than it has ever been before. Which is why most guys with great cars are not needing to publicly advertise them before they find new homes. If I come up with a really good, honest, 67 GT350 4 speed car...I have 3-5 guys right now who would buy the car it is priced appropriately and truly is a nice car. If someone isn't looking to totally gig the next guy on price and the car is a good one...it wont be for sale for long.
Like all other forms of collecting, quality will continue to matter to buyers more and more as the years go on. And quality will continue to be harder and harder to find.
Kind regards,
Vern