Barrett-Jackson Does Las Vegas

To the surprise of absolutely no one, yesterday Barrett-Jackson announced its third event, to be held in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Events Center Thursday through Saturday, October 16-18, 2008.

The similarity between the gratification action at a Barrett-Jackson auction and the gratification found in a high-roller weekend in Las Vegas has been widely used for years, so it's only natural to combine the two. Buyers who gamble away a portion of their bankroll before buying a car can explain that they just paid too much at the B-J auction for the car they finally buy with whatever's left. Everyone knows that people always pay too much at a B-J auction so it will be easy to accept the excuse.

Of course there is the problem with Las Vegas's motto, "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." Will auction buyers be able to get their cars home? Or will they have to leave them here in Vegas to be used next time they come to gamble, party and buy cars?

B-J's charity beneficiary for the Las Vegas show will be the Lili Claire Foundation, a charity founded to enhance the lives of childred living with Williams Syndrome, Down Syndrome and other neurogenetic disorders.

Gooding & Company Announces Scottsdale Auction

As if B-J, Russo and Steele, RM, Silver and Kruse (even a weekend later sweeping up any remaining no-sales) weren't enough last week Gooing & Company steppend into the January Arizona collector car auction fray with yet another sale.
They've tied up a site on Camelback adjacent to the Scottsdale Mall (just West of Scottsdale Road) but haven't committed to a date yet, preferring to say "during Scottsdale Auction Week".
Early consignments include:

• FCA Platinum-winning Ferrari Daytona Spyder;
• Packard Twelve with Custom Dietrich coachwork;
• Shelby Cobra 289;
• Ferrari 275 GTB/4;
• 1911 Rolls-Royce 40/50hp Silver Ghost Limousine;
• Maserati A6GCS Fantuzzi Spider.

Which, it must be said, beats heck out of more Hemi 'Cudas, Corvettes and Tupperware street rods.

Rick Carey

Barrett-Jackson's Las Vegas Invitation

Barrett-Jackson's invitation to its formal (finally) announcement of its 2008 Las Vegas auction at the Mandalay Bay arrived today. The date is October 29 ... of the announcement, that is.
The invitation came in a very neat package, albeit with a bordello-like black and red color scheme appropriate to Las Vegas, that folded up inside another folder. In the middle were two plastic-cased credentials.
The quality and creativity of the invitation, its presentation and delivery suggest that B-J's new management may also bring leadership and style.
It was a very classy presentation.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road
At Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale

Sometimes interesting information turns up in the oddest places.
For instance, while prowling around the Barrett-Jackson website at the "Sporsorship Opportunities" page the following figures turned up.

• B-J prints 10,000 folders to distribute "to event bidders, sponsors and consignors";
• They pre-print 60,000 General Admission event tickets [in addition to those that ticket buyers can print for themselves online];
• They print 25,000 credential lanyards for bidders, consignors, VIPs and sponsors (and media and staff and contractors.)

Those are informative numbers in the context of announced statistics.

Omega Subtly Responds

I got back from Hershey to discover that the Friday and Saturday editions of The Wall Street Journal had a subtle response by Omega watches to last week's article about auction finagling.
Friday had a full page color ad on the back of the front section; Saturday had a small color ad, but it was in the premier lower right corner position on the front page.
The ad? It featured an Omega "worn by John F. Kennedy at his inauguration ceremony on 20 January 1961." It concluded, "By courtesy of the OMEGA museum Bienne, Switzerland, who purchased this watch at the Guernsey's auction in December 2005 for USD 350,000."
In other words, in your face WSJ, we really are buying these watches at big money for our museum.
Very effective. Very subtle. Very refined and thoughtful. On the 1-5 scale, Omega gets a "1". They're concours perfect.

Rick Carey.

Hershey is Sweet for RM

RM Auctions held its first sale in Hershey during the AACA Fall Meet on Friday. Built around the amazing collection of Pat Swigart and his wife Helen, RM outdid itself, selling all but three of the 117 lots offered to a standing room only crowd in one of the Hershey Lodge ballrooms with the cars mostly displayed outside in tents.
The numbers speak for themselves: 97.4% sold, $12,323,320 changed hands, 47 sold under low estimate but another 25 sold over the high catalog estimate. The ballroom was full to the point where the fire marshall must have been having second thoughts.
When the 1911 Oldsmobile Limited sold (for $1,500,000 hammer, $1,650,000 with commission) a whole crowd of people left the ballroom but the remaining crowd was still SRO.
For those who have been predicting the demise of antique and classic car collecting, the median year (i.e., half older half newer) of the sold lots was 1931. A surprising number of the bidders who were there were (at least by the standards of the AACA) young, and they were as well informed as any group of collector car buyers in the world.
It was at least as impressive as RM's performance earlier this year in Maranello. Although Hershey is familiar territory the AACA and the Hershey crowd has been hostile to auctions for years and only slightly softened up by Don and Rob Williams' Hershey auction over the last few years.
High points other than the Limited were the DuPont Model G Le Mans Phaeton sold for $704,000; the Duesenberg Model J Murphy Dual Cowl Phaeton for $1,650,000, the 1912 Locomobile 6-48 Model M Sportsman Torpedo Tourer for $660,000, the Stutz DV32 Dual Cowl Phaeton for $797,500 and the 1911 Selden Model 40R Varsity Roadster for $220,000.

It was quite a show.

This is the Selden, one of very few built and only six known to survive but one of the most significant ... if infamous ... automobile marques in history.

Building Value Legends on the Auction Block

Today's (Monday, October 8, 2007) Wall Street Journal has a fascinating front page article on shenanigans in the high end watch business, focusing on the relationship between the Swiss Antiquourum auction company and two watchmatkers, Patek Phillipe and Omega.

It's particularly timely since Saturday's Journal had a huge advertising insert (twelve pages, an expense at which the mind boggles) called "Collecting and Investing in Watches" which was "produced in cooperation with Christie's".

Today's article, called "Invisible Hand: How Top Watchmakers Intervene in Auctions" reports that some of the record sales of Patek Phillipe watches at Antiquorum sales, and at least one Omega record at the April 2007 Antiquorum single marque "Omegamania" sale, have been to the manufacturers or their senior executives.

The practices noted in today's article don't have specific relevance to collector car auctions since -- with the exceptions of Ferrari (and Maserati), Porsche and Mercedes-Benz -- none of the marques which have collector market visibility still exist. But the same practices can be successfully employed by collectors and dealers to exploit the collector car auction market to build value legends.

Rick Carey

Less is More at Barrett-Jackson in 2008

That famous quote comes from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the architect.

It probably didn't occur to Craig Jackson and Steve Davis when they coincidentally announced, as an aside to describing the early headline consignments to Barrett-Jackson's January 2008 signature sale, that they're cutting back by 250 or so cars from the nearly-overwhelming 1,270 car consignment of 2007.

Part of the rationale for cutting back is B-J's desire to "shift" some of the Scottsdale consignment to an as yet unannounced new Fall auction site, which is widely known to be Las Vegas.

The concentration on higher value/smaller numbers also may be encouraged, if not instigated, by all the new management folks added to B-J in the wake of the investment in the company by Endeavour Capital, announced on September 19.

To those of us who were at WestWorld last year watching B-J try to get nearly 1,300 cars across the auction block, sell them, manage the SPEED Channel schedule, and get them off the block and out of the way, the acknowledgement that 1,300 cars is more than WestWorld and one auction block at B-J can handle -- even in six days -- was not unexpected. Cutting the number of cars will give B-J more room for vendors and increase the vendor location rental income. It will enhance the "event" aspects of the event.

This was the 2007 crowd at the start of the auction on Tuesday. It didn't get any smaller.

B-J has already proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, in West Palm Beach that the B-J team has the ability to translate the "Barrett-Jackson experience" to new venues and another venue (Las Vegas) is at once both a more lucrative and a less stressful opportunity than trying to figure out how to squeeze 1,500 cars across the WestWorld block.

It's a smart move, and not a moment too soon.

Rick Carey

Russo and Steele Secures Its Home

The shakeup in homes and real estate isn't confined to offices, residences, factories and shopping centers, it extends also to collector car auctions as was demonstrated earlier this year in Scottsdale.
Siting there is a peculiar thing: much of the land actually is owned by the State of Arizona or the feds. Some of it is controlled by the City of Scottsdale (for example, the WestWorld site of Barrett-Jackson.) Russo and Steele's site at the intersection of Scottsdale Road and the Loop 101 Freeway is another example. They've been leasing the site for the past seven years from the Arizona State Land Department.
Earlier this year Barrett-Jackson tried to lease a parcel next to Russo and Steele's which, it turned out, Russo and Steele wanted to use for parking. It got to be ugly, as things like this sometimes do.
The happy ending for collector car auction junkies is that Russo and Steele announced yesterday that they had secured a multi-year lease of the traditional site which, like the rest of Scottsdale's desert, has rapidly been encapsulated by the ever-expanding city of Scottsdale.
Where once there were jackrabbits now there are Starbucks.
Eventually Russo and Steele's site is going to become so valuable for retail, office or residential development there will be no holding back the encroachment on the site, but for now and the immediate future the prospects are bright and Drew Alcazar is promising 500 cars on four auction days, Thursday January 17 through Sunday January 20, 2008.
At least we'll know where to find them.

Rick Carey

Ernie Clair Auction Totals

The numbers are in and the Keenan Auction Company Ernie Clair sale brought in $1,341,920 including commissions. That's an average for the 110 or so lots that crossed the block (as opposed to the "Field Art" lots) of $12,199 and a median sale of $7,425.

Impressive.

In case anyone wonders, this is what is classified as "Field Art."

Ernie Clair, Sr. Auction is a Saco Success

The Keenan brothers hit the ball out of the park with the Ernie Clair auction in Saco, Maine on Sunday.
Clair, who owned 19 auto dealerships in the Boston area and in Maine at the time of his death at age 80 in 2004 and was reported at the time to be the largest private landowner in both Boston and Maine, accumulated cars like he accumulated property. He obviously wasn't big on doing anything with them, just acquiring them and keeping them.
The cars were a diverse mix. There were lots of Buicks -- I recall that a Buick store was the foundation of Clair Motors -- many of which may have been traded in. Many others were obviously found in fields that he bought. There were vehicles that were literally broken in half from rot and others that looked like they'd already started a sort of environmental crushing process.
Others had been good cars at one point but had been left unattended for way too long.
None of that seemed to deter the bidders, most of whom were local and many of whom seemed to have no concept of "the market", at least based upon the prices being paid.
The 1953 Buick Skylark is a good example. A largely complete and basically sound car, it had been left for decades and was in "needs everything" condition. An internet bidder on Proxibid paid $71,000 plus a 10% commission for it, $78,100, and then had to get it home. Figure it'll be $80,000 (if no sales tax was due) by the time it gets to a restorer. Done perfectly it's a $200,000 car, and the journey to get from here to "done perfectly" is going to cost more than $100,000.
Most of the first 90 or so cars crossed the block, a few of them under their own power but most being pushed (the pushers earned their money today). A few went right across the block and out the other side (no brakes.)
Optimism reigned supreme, which is telling at a time when real estate values are wobbly, gasoline is three bucks a gallon and the Detroit Big Three aren't "Big" any more.