If you’re exploring our website with a view to borrowing one of our secured asset loans, you’ll quickly see that, at peer-to-peer lender Unbolted, we seek to be as versatile as possible in the range of high-value possessions we include as collateralisable assets. Your creditworthiness is of no interest to our hundreds of p2p lenders; if you’ve got a valuable asset you can use as collateral for your borrowing requirements, that’s all it takes – there are no intrusive credit searches, no rummaging through your private financial records and no digital credit-rating footprints that can in themselves damage your score. As one of our asset categories is Classic Cars, we thought we’d review what did well in this market during 2015 and what 2016 is likely to hold.
Values at auctions continued to do well last year for these beautiful machines – works of art on wheels, no less. But the growth in value was a little slower than the rip-roaring rises seen in 2013 and 2014. The monthly “Top Index” from the Historic Automobile Group Index (HAGI) in November last year shows that the classic car market certainly grew year-on-year, expanding by 16.05 percent on the same time in 2014.
Prices definitely continued to climb, and Ferraris lead the way, with Testarossa prices rocketing in particular. At the start of the year, a Ferrari Testarossa in premium condition would fetch just over £75,000. By the end of the year, the value was closing in on £300,000.
Interestingly, a new generation of classic car buyers appears to have skewed the market in favour of classic vehicle from the 80s and 90s – the decades in which they were laying the foundations for their future classic car tastes. It’s not only classic Porsches and Ferraris of the 80s and 90s that attracted enthusiasts in droves. There was plenty of interest in cars below £100,000, such as the stately Austin Healey.
Auction houses, meanwhile, were facing a challenge in 2015. As prices surged, seemingly unstoppable in the previous two years, sellers’ expectations of the value of their beloved cars was often way too high. That meant that many sold beneath seller estimates but nonetheless fetched very decent market values.
As for 2016, the market has plenty of steam left in it – most classic cars today are readily available, and the choice has never been so extensive. Even though the supply of cars such as Ferraris and Porsches has gone stratospheric (some have doubled in availability), prices have still been rising even in conditions of supply outstripping demand.
It’s highly likely that the focus in 2016 will be on genuinely unique vehicles, irrespective of the marque. The market for “average” cars, plentiful though they are, eased in 2015. What will remain consistent is the trend seen over the last three years: quality will continue to be the defining feature.
Toward the close of 2015, though, restored cars were being brought to market by sellers in increased quantities. But again, quality is king: the quality of the restoration really has to be impeccable if the vehicle’s value is to be enhanced.
