Public service announcement: List of Ford GTs at upcoming auctions (with links)

[twobjshelbys]

This car sold at Barrett Jackson Vegas in October and again yesterday at Mecum Florida. BJ buyer fee is 10%, seller fee is 8% plus time and day placement fee, as I understand. Mecum buyer fee is 10%, seller fee is 6% without reserve and 10% with reserve plus time and day placement fee, as I understand. The table below assumes 10% buyer fee and 8% seller fee for both. No placement fees.

2006 Ford GT Heritage Edition at Kissimmee 2020 as S213 - Mecum Auctions

2006 Ford GT Heritage Edition crossing the auction block at Kissimmee 2020 as S213.

www.mecum.com

	BJ Vegas​	Mecum FL​
	10/5/2019​	1/11/2020​
Seller Received	$271,400​	$312,800​
Hammer	$295,000​	$340,000​
Buyer Paid	$324,500​	$374,000​
Auction Fee	$53,100​	$61,200​

You beat me to it. As you recall this is my former car. You had the BJ/Vegas fees correct. There is a small fixed consignment fee that is separate. I believe the Mecum fees are 10% but no matter how you cut it, the buyer lost money trying to flip it... I think this sequence pretty firmly establishes "driven" (but not high or low miles) Heritage prices... The days of 500K+ Heritages are gone...

 

[KJD]

Auction houses did well.

 

[BAT]

You beat me to it. As you recall this is my former car. You had the BJ/Vegas fees correct. There is a small fixed consignment fee that is separate. I believe the Mecum fees are 10% but no matter how you cut it, the buyer lost money trying to flip it... I think this sequence pretty firmly establishes "driven" (but not high or low miles) Heritage prices... The days of 500K+ Heritages are gone...

Unless of course you have the only heritage GT to survive Euro Trip 2016.

 

[twobjshelbys]

Here's the final Mecum list

Date	Lot	Year	Make	Model	High bid	Sold Price
1/10/2020​	F165	2005​	Ford	GT		$335,500​
1/10/2020​	F166	2005​	Ford	GT		$374,000​
1/10/2020​	F201	2005​	Ford	GT	$270,000​	reserve not met
1/11/2020​	S85.1	2005​	Ford	GT	No Info
1/11/2020​	S124	2006​	Ford	GT		$247,500​
1/10/2020​	F164	2017​	Ford	GT	$1,000,000​	reserve not met
1/10/2020​	F111	2006​	Ford	GT Heritage Edition		$429,000​
1/11/2020​	S213	2006​	Ford	GT Heritage Edition		$374,000​

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[jammer]

Tony- Thanks for posting the results. Are these before buyer fees or are buyer fees included in the Sold Price?

 

[twobjshelbys]

Tony- Thanks for posting the results. Are these before buyer fees or are buyer fees included in the Sold Price?

They include the buyer's fee = Hammer + 10%

 

[Gene Cassone]

For those looking for a rare 2017 comp car is coming up for auction in March at Glendale. ( S Bourdais’s car)

 

[Stef]

Very interesting tread here.

I read something somewhere,
the speculation was in this article that the 05/06 Ford GT'S are going the way of the Lambo Muira, within the next decade or less.

 

[centerpunch]

Here are results with added column showing estimated seller and auction house proceeds.
.

 

[SYCO GT]

Holy margins!

 

[centerpunch]

Yep, auction house gets about 18%.

 

[SYCO GT]

At least they fairly rake both sellers and buyers through the coals. Well, the seller even a little more, with the listing fee...

 

[centerpunch]

It's interesting psychology, I guess. The hammer price is totally a fake number, since it is neither what the buyer pays nor what the seller receives.

The buyer knows the selling price is actually 10% more than the number he bids.

I suppose some math-challenged sellers think they are only paying a 10% fee, but they are wrong!

 

[nid4spd]

Just curious

 

[dbk]

Additionally, we have no way of knowing what the seller fees are. Mecum cuts deals all the time. I've literally heard the hot mic on live television pick up Dana Mecum say "if you lift the reserve we'll waive the seller fee." I've personally witnessed the seller fee on a new GT get nuked as an enticement to auction it. These are huge swings in the final actual price of the car people assume they are seeing, i.e yet another reason to discount this stuff unless you're auctioning your car.

Asymmetric information everywhere.

 

[centerpunch]

Uhh, DBK is right, as always.

We really don’t know the actual seller proceeds- I did the spreadsheet based on their published numbers.

But we DO know what the buyers paid.

(EDIT Like DBK says, maybe we don’t know that either! Who know what negotiations really occur!)

I like exposing the reality of auctions- there is really no such thing as separate buyers fee and sellers fee. Unless the seller negotiates a different deal with the auction house, when a car sells for X dollars, the auction house gets about an 18% commission and the seller gets what’s left. IMO there’s usually only one winner in that deal.

 

[twobjshelbys]

Uhh, DBK is right, as always.

We really don’t know the actual seller proceeds- I did the spreadsheet based on their published numbers.

But we DO know what the buyers paid.

(EDIT Like DBK says, maybe we don’t know that either! Who know what negotiations really occur!)

I like exposing the reality of auctions- there is really no such thing as separate buyers fee and sellers fee. Unless the seller negotiates a different deal with the auction house, when a car sells for X dollars, the auction house gets about an 18% commission and the seller gets what’s left. IMO there’s usually only one winner in that deal.

Mecum is known to drop the seller's side commission to get a sale, but it's not zero, it's usually not a percent but an amount. In the end, it's not a major amount.

BJ told me they would negotiate a reserve car on the floor to make the sale (but again, not by much) but non-reserve cars are fixed on both sides. Period. BJ is quickly heading back to no-reserve auctions. I wanted my car on reserve at BJ Vegas and they wouldn't do it saying it would be the only one and they wanted no-reserve there and were moving back that way. I was on the buyer side a few years ago when a final bidder was false (who knows why) and it came back to me and I asked if they would soften the buyer's side (since if I hadn't taken it they would have had to re-open) and they said no but I took it anyway since it was below my threshold.

I'll add that that is based on a people with single car at the auction. Who knows what happens when some of these 10, 20, 30 car collections are liquidated. Heck, BJ spent a whole week on Ron Pratte's collection. I suppose they might cut deals to their volume buyers too, like Pratte before he "retired", but like I said, it ain't gonna be much.

I can't fathom the cost of essentially renting the entire Mandalay Bay convention center for a week (set up starts 5 days in advance). They get revenue from the exhibitors too, but a place like that doesn't come cheap. They have an "in" with City of Scottsdale for the horse arena. All the others are commercial venues.

 

[HighHP]

If you add up all the costs to flip Toni's Heritage from BJ to Mecum, buyers fee, sellers fee, transport, insurance, state b&o tax, etc, I don't think speculators will flip on these numbers. An affiliate of Mecum clearly can make money doing so, such as could have happened with Toni's Heritage.

 

[twobjshelbys]

If you add up all the costs to flip Toni's Heritage from BJ to Mecum, buyers fee, sellers fee, transport, insurance, state b&o tax, etc, I don't think speculators will flip on these numbers. An affiliate of Mecum clearly can make money doing so, such as could have happened with Toni's Heritage.

There's no way they made money on my (former) car. Even if Mecum adjusted the fees, they might have come closer to breaking even, but no profit was to be had. You're right about all of the other stuff, including sales tax which I had forgotten, but which would not have been collected if the buyer was a dealer. But he still had shipping of 3K even if it went straight from Vegas to Florida.

I still think the low miles Heritage and my former car were from the same source. The photo backgrounds on both look very similar although I couldn't line up any specific angles.

 

[HighHP]

If a Mecum affiliate bought the car for $324,500 at BJ, then sold it for $374,000 at Mecum, the Mecum corporation grossed $49,500 on the flip of the car. Plus all the marketing benefits and excitement related to such a premuim car. Not complaining, as long as it is all done in a public auction. Toni wins with a higher price, Mecum wins and we all get a lot to talk about. A real Market Maker. Adds to the overall liquidity of the auction market. The intrinsic value of such an exotic car is well beyond it's selling price.