Putting a Price on Feelings

How anxious is the seller to sell? Is he emotional, ready to bail out? How anxious is the buyer? Has he just missed a similar car?

by Jim Schrager

Various Porsche talk boards are buzzing with complaints about the usefulness of price guides for early 911S cars (1967–73). About how the prices are too low, the guides are silly, and the magazines that publish them are stupid. I’d like to say hang on just a minute.

You cannot accurately measure prices when an organized market does not exist. Although old cars are bought and sold every day, that does not an organized market make. A market requires standardized, fungible goods and an orderly central clearing house; for example, shares of stock on the New York Stock Exchange or tons of lead on the London Metals Exchange. We have neither requirement in the old car business, with nearly unique goods and the complete lack of a central exchange. In addition, we have cross-border transactions with wildly fluctuating foreign currency exchange rates, which can...