Market Intelligence
RM Sotheby’s at Hershey – the Right Day to Break Open the Piggy Bank
Nine cars, $288,400 spent – the hammer falls on a Topolino, a Packard V12, and a Woodie Wagon amid the quiet discipline of Hershey.
In 2020, deep in the Covid lockdown and stuck at home, I wrote about how, with the price of a 458 Speciale – $324,500 – I could have bought five cars that would have made me genuinely happy.
The RM auction at Hershey, a two-day sale dedicated exclusively to cars from the 1920s through the 1960s, brought that story back to mind and made it feel current again. I broke open the savings piggy bank and set out to see how many cars I could have bought at this auction with that same figure. Of the 165 cars on offer, no fewer than 96 – 58% of the total – were pre-war, while only 10 (a mere 6%) dated from after 1965. A remarkable 140 cars were offered without reserve (85%), and 163 of them sold, for an extraordinary rate of 98.79%.
Despite being the second-largest sale by lot count after Monterey, you can forget Monterey’s numbers: the total here was just $13,566,000, with hammer prices reaching $12,607,370 – an average of $77,346 per car.
