Longest Time to Sell a Dino

As regular readers will know I collate data on the dino market. I have (incomplete) data on the length of time that individual Dinos have been offered for sale in the UK market before either selling or being withdrawn from the market.

This data (attached in raw form and focussed on the more reliable last 7/8 years) suggests that rather than there being a big price adjustment in the dealer channel when the market slows, the market actually initially freezes up with sellers still seeking the old price but no buyers emerging. (SOR sales make this a low cost strategy for many dealers; the seller pays the stock holding cost). It could of course be that the discount to the screen price just gets bigger when the market is weak - there is some data to support this too.

The longest time i have recorded between a car initially being offered for sale (1989) and actually selling (2003) is 14 years (the owner posts here, I apologise but can't recall the name).

How would this compare to others experience of selling cars and has it changed over the years?
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raw data
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What, if any, is the correlation to PLA (price level adjusted) prices and length of time to sell? Do you have a data set that you could group by % over/under avg PLA prices or something similar? Also, do you have any way of capturing quality or optional equipment (i.e. "chairs and flairs," GT vs. GTS, color, etc.)? I wonder if a GT stays on sale longer than a GTS? It might be different in the UK than it is in the U.S.

Mark

 

Quality is the holy grail of these data sets - nobody has ever collected a really good , reliable quality marker (all thoughts very welcome). Although I do capture all the qualitative data available these days, it's inherantly unreliable as it invariably comes from a vendor ("Concours" claims when they more accurately mean resprayed and retrimmed etc etc).

I'll look at the price/sale time data, although it's complicated by both inflation as you noted, and more technically problematic is that prices are often varied whilst a car is offered in the market and some dealers are always POA.

 

Time to sell v Price (Nominal)
Time to sell v Year first offered (clearly any car offered in the more recent past has fewer months in which to be in the market)

The data quality improves from about 200 onwards so I'm not sure that anything reliable can be concluded. Having said that the 89 boom is pretty clear and the data suggests that stock turn is slowing as price is rising.
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I understand that days on market factors into the movement of the market, but anybody that took 14 years to sell a car wasn't too motivated and the car wasn't really on the market, that's just what he told his wife.

 

A dealer in 1989 put the car on the market for £175k. Kept advertising it POA for years after the market crashed when it was in storage. A guy on here bought it in 2003, I have in mind a price in the 40s or 50s, but that may be me imagining it. The car needed a full restoration which was also on here from memory.

 

John,
I have a suspicion that you are refering to me!
Although your data is a little inaccurate as i actually bought the car in October 2004.
That said the vendor whom is a classic car dealer on Sanbanks in Poole bought the car just before the bust of 1989 whereupon he had bought the car in for around £150k then priced it at £175k, turned down an offer of 160k.....then a week later he couldnt sell it for peanuts!
He then removed the car from his garage and placed it in storage at his own house for 15 years until he sold it to some mug (Me)
I believe that he did from time to time offer the car for sale but started offering it more seriously when he faced impending divorce. (to which i am not suprised as he was more keen to show me photos of his Thai girlfriend than sell me the car!)
5 years and a lot of money later the car is beutiful even though i say so myself!
G P
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That's the one. Thanks

 

Am I correct in assuming that the price data is in nominal £s? What is the avg advertised price for a GT vs. a GTS in the UK now? Do you have a general CPI/PLA list by year for £s so that we could ROUGHLY see what is happening with the prices?

Also, are LHD cars included in your data? Can you distinguish an avg price delta for RHD cars vs. LHD Euro cars vs. LHD US cars (assuming there are some Euro and US cars that have been advertised for sale in the UK)?

Thanks again,
Mark

 

the Data is in nominal £s.

The GT v GTS graph is below. (dealer offered cars only - i.e no auctions/private sales)

I periodically post the price distribution data here (much to some people's annoyance). As the year has ended, the latest graph is below. (apologies to those who see it as a repost - it is updated for the whole of 2009)

Adjusting for inflation is problematic: I do do it, but I find it frankly pretty meaningless. The cost of ownership as the cars age impacts the sale price as much as any change in the value of money for example. However the graph is below.

No LHD cars are included so I can't do any RHD/LHD analysis. I do include RHD cars that are advertised in England (or in English on the web these days) even if the car is overseas. There are very few LHD cars left in the UK, they appear to mainly have gone overseas in the late 80s. We have seen repatriation of cars that went to Japan in the past few years but the fall in £ sterling will stop that.
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Very interesting research!
I would be most interested in comparisons to other market prices such as housing, equities and currencies.
Have you found any "leading indicators" of price movement/trends for the dino?
Also, your scatter charts could benefit from dropping outliers from the picture so you could see where the real trend is heading.
Great work!

 

I asked myself the same question and did the attached a while back and updated it at the year end. The issue is what an "average" means when talking about cars of variable quality. Doing a traditional 1.96 Standard deviations, 95% confidence interval doesn't cast much light on values, but does show how prices break down in booms and busts (i.e the vaiance grows dramatically)
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