Don’t get car fans started on their Bring a Trailer addiction.
The auction site for everything from classic cars to modern enthusiast vehicles started from humble beginnings and word of mouth to become the end-all be-all of the best cars at auction, online.
Bring a Trailer, owned by Hearst Magazines since 2020, has seen its user base jump and page views increase as the “auction voyeurism” trend has interested fans logging to find their perfect car (that they may never buy), but the auction action brings an excitement and “what if” factor that’s hard to replicate from the comfort of your own home.
But it’s not just window shoppers, Bring a Trailer saw its 2023 sales increase in a year where higher interest rates, rising insurance premiums, and economic uncertainty weighed on the auto market. Bring a Trailer’s revenue climbed 2% to over $1.4 billion, with total volume of sales topping 30,000, up 19% from a year ago.
However a jump in total unit sales of 19% with revenue climbing only 2% means prices per lot came down, and they did. The average price per car sold at auction on Bring a Trailer fell to $54K from $59.5K the year before.
The question is — are the heady times over for the classic car market — one of the biggest alternative asset classes out there?
“There was a big bubble in 2022, people were spending money like crazy on cars, on other things, and 2023 corrected that,” said Randy Nonnenberg, Bring a Trailer CEO in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “We see the values of the cars [now] to be pretty consistent to where they were in 2023, so that's gonna sort of stabilize as people figure out what they're doing.”
Now the site did notch several huge sales, with a “virtual” hammer price of $2.89 million for a 2014 Pagani Huayra, $2.5 million for 1967 Porsche 910, and $1.79 million for a 2020 Ford GT.
“Well these are obviously way at the top, but most people aren't out there spending 3 million bucks on a car, but thankfully some people are,” Nonnenberg said with a laugh.
Though there were huge sums, they didn’t match some of the big auctions that happened in the heady days of 2022. “People were throwing money at these [in 2022] thinking that they're gonna make a return on them in as soon as 12 months, and that sort of exuberance was a little bit over optimistic, but now they're settled in.”
Nonnenberg is more focused on the “bread and butter” listings as he calls it, the $50-$60K cars. After all, since Bring a Trailer only charges a listing fee of $99 and a buyer fee of 5% of the car’s sale price, which is capped at $5,000, those million dollar listings don’t bring in that much more revenue (though there is a prestige factor).
Bring a Trailer isn’t the only game in town when it comes to online auctions. eBay Motors, Cars and Bids (started by car reviewer Doug DeMuro and owned by The Chernin Group), and PCarMarket, among others, all cater to buyers big and small.
One way to help with the “bread and butter” listings, as Nonnenberg calls them, is to facilitate sales between buyers and sellers; currently once a sale is complete on Bring a Trailer the two parties have to hash out payment, title transfer, and car delivery, which can be difficult and financially scary at times.
“There are digital tools now that we've been developing for the last number of months that we're gonna launch in the next 30 days that will help people actually transfer the paperwork, send the money, escrow service, verification — more things to elevate and make it easier to sell online,” Nonnenberg said. “You can rely on Bring a Trailer to make that a safer and better transaction.”
With better purchasing tools and more auctions happening every day, voyeurs may turn into future purchasers.
Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.
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