A Bite of the Market -Collector Car Trends for the Next Six Months by Mike Thies

As I am appraising vehicles, many folks ask me what the future holds. I tell here what I tell them. So often I am too close to the "real metal" to have much of a crystal ball and it's not my strength, anyway. However, when I stand back and do the research, sometimes a cloudy picture does come through. It seems to me that the last twelve months told two different stories about the collector car market, and both were true at once.

On paper, the market cooled. The Hagerty Market Rating, which tracks values, private sales, and auction activity, fell to its lowest point in nearly fifteen years, declining in 37 of the past 43 months since peaking in the summer of 2022. Median auction prices dropped to their lowest real value in almost six years, and barely a third of private sales came in above insured values, the weakest showing in nearly four years.

Then Monterey Car Week happened. Five auction houses moved $747.9 million in cars over three days in August, a 73 percent jump over 2025's $432.8 million and a new record for the week. Average sale price climbed 64 percent to $866,107, and eleven cars sold for eight figures, more than the previous five Monterey weeks combined. A 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe brought $42.9 million, the most ever paid for an American car at auction. Barrett-Jackson's Scottsdale sale back in January told a similar story at a different price point, more than $191 million in sales at a 100 percent sell-through rate. This is a market beyond my personal reach, but I look to them quite often for comaprisons.

So, which is it, a soft market or a booming one? Both, depending on what is crossing the block. Cars from the late 1980s through the 2000s, Nissan Skyline GT-Rs, Porsche Carrera GTs, C6 Corvette Z06s, and late-model Ferraris, keep climbing as the buyers who grew up wanting them to reach their peak earning years. DriveIndex, which tracks more than 110,000 auction sales, shows some of these appreciating near 28 percent a year. Meanwhile prewar classics and ordinary muscle cars without exceptional documentation are sliding. Several 1930s classics sold well under estimate at Monterey, and premium luxury SUVs like the Porsche Cayenne Turbo are losing over 20 percent of their value annually.

Expect that split to hold through the fall and into the January Scottsdale sales. Cars with strong provenance, honest documentation, and realistic reserves should keep finding buyers, sometimes at record prices. Ordinary cars riding on nostalgia alone will likely keep drifting lower unless sellers adjust their expectations. If you want one number to watch instead of the headline totals, follow the sell-through rate[1]. It seems to tells us more about real demand than any single big sale does.

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[1]Sell-through rate is lots sold divided by lots offered, and every major house (Barrett-Jackson, Mecum, RM Sotheby's, Gooding & Company, Bonhams) states it in its post-sale results within a day or two, with Hagerty Insider tracking it across the industry; check it at three or four sales a year, Scottsdale in January, Amelia Island in March, Monterey in August, to build a baseline for what's normal.