Prewar Auction Deals: Lessons from Bonhams and RM Sotheby's

Before commenting on these two auctions dedicated to cars from the distant past, out of curiosity, I picked up a few auction catalogs from 20 years ago and compared them to the price lists of new cars you could buy back then. For the price of a Volkswagen Golf GTI (€26,000 in 2004), you could have purchased a Mercedes-Benz 190SL or, for just a couple of thousand euros more, a Ferrari 365 GT 2+2. Now, the Golf costs around €45,000, while the Mercedes far exceeds €100,000, and you can expect almost double that for a 365. The same goes for the BMW 320d Touring, which cost about the same as a Maserati Ghibli 4.9SS (Coupé), and if you were lucky enough to have the “magic” €100,000, you could choose between a Maserati Quattroporte 4.2 (€103,000), a Daytona (€96,000), or a Miura S (€105,000). To be clear, I'm talking about prices from the same period, allowing the market, over the years, to determine the values of certain models as time reveals their worth. Or forgets them: there is a category of cars whose prices haven’t skyrocketed—prewar cars. In fact, today they’ve become “uncool” as their market has thinned out (a polite way of saying most of those collectors have passed away).

However, these are cars that are still in high demand for events. Owning even a modestly valued one grants you VIP access to any rally or concours d'elegance—note that at the top concours d'elegance, pre-1945 cars still win most of the awards—and don’t forget the increasing rarity of these vehicles. So, by combining curiosity with patience, you can buy important cars at bargain prices. And it won’t always be this way if you buy wisely. Let’s take these two auctions as examples of where you could hunt for deals: in England on September 14, Bonhams hosted a sale at the Beaulieu Autojumble, while on October 9-10, RM organized a sale at the Hershey Autojumble, the world’s largest auto fair.