Imagine you are fishing. You hook a nice-sized, juicy-looking trout. You are reeling it in, and just as you are about to net it someone else reaches in, grabs it and scampers away with it.
That’s the way it’s been for me with three Austin-Healey 3000s in the past two weeks.
With over 73,000 Big Healeys of all flavors built, there will always be a few for sale. At one point last week there were five being offered on Bring a Trailer.
I found three I was interested in enough to consider bidding on: a 1965 BJ8 Mk III, a 1960 BT7 Mk I, and a 1962 BT7 Mk II.
Yet with all three, in the last hour of the auction a new bidder appeared. His appropriately chosen handle is “carbuyer01”. This bidder has placed 1,194 bids and won 65 cars, primarily classic sports cars.
The seller of one car I was outbid on told me later that this is a European dealer based in France.
That makes a lot of sense. In a way, foreign buyers (and U.S. as well) can use BaT as both a magnet and a filter. If you are looking for a Big Healey you can sift through the listings and make decisions, without having to travel huge distances to personally examine the cars. The fact that we are all attracted to and bidding on the same cars lets me think my “BaT Radar” is working well, at least when set to what a French dealer could resell for a profit.
However, that also means that I will probably have to spend several thousand dollars more to outbid him when the right car comes along.
I’m not complaining about this, as in every auction there is always someone who can outbid you.
And in the end, this simply means more money for the sellers, and how can we be against that?
It’s just another unexpected facet of BaT as it globalizes the collector car market.
Would this kind of competition cause you to buy only locally listed cars, or are you comfortable competing with commercial buyers from all over the world?
I look forward to your comments below.
Read my previous blog posts here.
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