But prices, while sure to stay stellar for the next several years, won’t continue their exponential rise indefinitely. So the real question is, what's next?
If you ask the number crunchers, they say it is Porsche. Recently in New York, a 1973 Porsche Carrera RS 2.7 Touring sold for just under US$1mil.
“Of all of the people who sold a [classic] SL this year, 50 percent of them turned around and bought a Porsche,” McKeel Hagerty, the CEO of Hagerty.com, said recently. “Of that group, half bought a 911, and half bought a 356. I don’t think that's a coincidence.”
Of course, the other 50 percent of those guys bought another Mercedes, a Ferrari, or a Jaguar, to varying degree. And Ferrari still dominates the classic market, with seven of the 10 highest North American sale prices of 2015 belonging to that Italian icon. (No. 1 was a 1956 Ferrari 290 MM Spider that sold for more than US$28mil Dec. 10 in New York.) But it is significant that Porsche alone dominates the next-up cull.
Recent auction numbers do seem to indicate an uptick. Blue chip cars in general have risen from an average value of US$600,000 in 2007 to US$2.6mil today.
(As with company stocks, “blue chip” autos are the most expensive and consistent in the field) German-made cars vintage jumped from an average value of US$150,000 in 2007 to US$625,000 today; Porsches in particular have gone from five- to six and seven digits in the same time frame, with even models as late as early 2000s’ Carrera GT's hitting near themil-dollar mark on a model that used to be worth US$300,000.
“European sports cars in general have been on a real rise in the last couple of years,” said Gord Duff, the car specialist at RM Sotheby’s. “Ferraris lead the way and then you go to the next greatest European sports cars, which are Mercedes, and then you get to Porsches. If we are saying Mercedes have peaked, Porsches are the next best thing.”
Hagerty data that combines public auction sales and private sales shows that the 1974-1977 Porsche 911 has increased the most in average sale price of any classic car this year, with a jump of 154 percent in value over 2014. That's more than anything from Aston Martin, Ferrari or Lamborghini.
And auction houses offered 27 more Porsches this year at the Monterey auctions than they did last year, especially 930s and 911 SC models. (The 930 is a flat-6 engine that was the top of the 911 range during the late ’70s and ’80s.) Searches for Porsche make up 23.5 percent of all queries by collectors ages 30 to 50, according to Hagerty.
Here's what's likely pushing the Porsche passion: Guys who were kids in the ‘80s.
“With 911s, they were a poster car in the 70s and early 80s,” Duff said. “Guys in their 40s now had a poster of that car when they were 10 years old, and now they’re out there finding them.”
In fact, 1980 and newer vehicles have the fastest growth rates of any models; North American classic car auction sales have reached a record US$1.45 billion total in 2015, an 11-percent increase over 2014's US$1.31 billion. The growth was pushed by activity among collectors who added 17 percent more 1980s-and- newer vehicles to existing Hagerty insurance policies-versus a 2.3-percent increase for pre-1980s classics.
What's more, there are plenty of Porsches on the market now that have been owned by one person who bought it for US$30,000 20 or 30 years ago and are now worth US$150,000. It's just too tempting not to sell. (Or to buy, since the numbers seem to keep rising.)
