MARKET LEADERBOARD

💰 The figures shared below don’t count any other sales such as car seats, memorabilia etc..

I only include websites that have sold 5+ cars in the chart below. Which means Hagerty, Hemmings and many others did not sell 5 cars yesterday!

Yesterday marked a modestly successful day in the realm of car sales, with the overall transactions reaching a sum of $5.5 million. A significant portion of this amount, approximately $3.4 million, was attributed to the sales on the Bring a Trailer, underscoring its substantial influence in the collector car space.

Amidst the day's business, one event stood out: the sale of a 1966 Ford Mustang Custom Fastback. This classic model, renowned for its iconic design and cultural significance, fetched a remarkable $134,500. The sale took place on Autohunter, a platform we don’t often feature on here, due to their lack of sales. but yesterday they reeled in a big one, congrats to them.

The Mustang's magnetic charm is undeniable, still capturing hearts as it did decades ago. It's evident in the latest numbers—two Mustangs galloped into the top 10 sales recently. Diving into the data from the past month, a herd of 126 Mustangs changed hands, and a whopping 76% of those sales were spurred on by the bustling marketplace at BaT.

Auction Recap for the 2023 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 Coupe 3LZ Z07 70th Anniversary Edition:

A sizzling 2023 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 Coupe, the 70th Anniversary Edition, just rolled off the auction block for a cool $160,000—a tidy $10k above sticker. But let's cut to the chase: this deal was more of a fender bender than a victory lap.

Here’s the breakdown:

• This Corvette was practically brand new with a mere 9 miles clocked. It boasted top-tier options including the Z07 Performance Package, Magnetic Ride Control, and more.

• It came with all the bells and whistles documented, right down to the window sticker confirming a $149,520 initial price tag.

• The car's past life was short, first taking a breath in North Carolina before the dealer scooped it up in Michigan.

Now, why didn't this machine fetch a higher premium?

1. Warranty Woes: GM's stern warning was clear—a resale within the first six months meant adios warranty. This Corvette's six-month grace period was barely up, and the new owner was left holding the bag without GM's safety net.

2. Silent Seller Syndrome: The dealer sat on the sidelines during the auction. Big mistake. Engagement is key. You gotta work the crowd, pump up the bidders, create that buzz.

So, what's the teachable moment here? It's simple: Flipping a car ain't just about timing and pricing. It's also about finesse—warranty intact and seller on deck, guns blazing. If you're aiming for top dollar, don't leave these boxes unchecked. This wasn't just a sale; it was a missed opportunity dressed in White Pearl Metallic. Next time, let's get those hands dirty, make some noise, and really show the buyers what they're missing out on.

In a delightful departure from our traditional written exchanges, The Daily Vroom is thrilled to present an exclusive interview that ventures beyond the written word. Edward Lovett, the visionary founder of Collecting Cars, generously allotted an entire hour to engage in a comprehensive dialogue with us, where every topic was fair game and no question was off-limits.

This conversation offers an unfiltered glimpse into the insights and experiences of a pioneering entrepreneur in the automotive collection space. While we have preserved the integrity and essence of the discussion, we have meticulously refined the transcript for clarity and readability, carefully editing out any repetitious language to ensure a seamless reading experience.

Join us as we delve into the candid and enlightening perspectives of Edward Lovett, offering a deep dive into the intricate dynamics of car collecting and the visionary roadmap of Collecting Cars.

TDV: At The Daily Vroom we look at a lot of different sites. We look at a lot of different trends throughout the space. Obviously when you think about celebrating your own milestones, congratulations on some remarkable success in the space. Collecting Cars has really achieved a lot since its inception, and you've had a couple of really terrific years. If you could, could you share some of your highlights of the journey so far and sort of what the highlights have been for you in building this new platform?

EL: I can try. I think most of the ones that we've had that we've publicize as a business, you can see whether they are multimillion dollar pound cars, values of cars, etc. 

But for me personally, it is the success of building a sustainable, profitable business.

Because that is more challenging than I think anyone could ever prepare themselves for. So for us, that is the ultimate celebration. We are still here after five years. We are profitable, we have a hundred employees, we've got a big user base, we've got a big social following, we've got a big brand awareness and that's taken an awful lot of hard work. And in the early days, of course, every time a new competitor comes out, you go, oh, that's a good name. Or all their UX is quite interesting, but within months they've disappeared and we've become more and more resilient the longer that we go on, I guess. And we build that moat around us.

TDV: I'm fascinated in how businesses get formed often in the image of their founders and their creating teams. You've obviously focused not only on collections of automobiles, also on watches, and you obviously have the same collector gene that most of us have in this space, but what are your personal collecting habits and do you plan on expanding out into other luxury goods or other categories as well?

EL: Yes, is the answer to that. There's no urgency in doing it because it is all consuming running the business that we already run. So I don't think we want to rush into doing something that's going to distract us from our core business activities at the moment. And there remains quite a bit of research knowledge and understanding of those different verticals as well. Clearly the other thing that's changed significantly, if we were sat here two years ago having this call, we wouldn't have thought you could never do anything wrong. Let's go in and invest in sneakers and cigars and wine whiskey, art stamps, whatever it might be, handbags. But we have seen a decline in value and in almost all these asset classes, given the global economy wars going on interest rates.

I think it's actually time serving us quite well at the moment because maybe the asset classes that we would've thought were interesting 24 months ago will not be the ones that are really interesting when we come out the other side of this.

TDV: It's been fascinating looking at your business as a global concern and a true global business. And that brings with it some tremendous opportunities. It also brings with it some great challenges. And I know you've recently opened in Hong Kong, I know you started your first international office in Sydney, but it's clear that Collecting Cars has been executing on a global vision and that's incredibly commendable. That being said, is the strategy to just continue planting roots in multiple places around the world. 

A lot of our user base is  based in the US, I think a lot of them would love to know, are there plans to establish more of a presence here in the US as well?

EL: Yeah, so to answer the first one, when I started this, I had no real interest in just launching a UK based business. I personally had an aspiration to build a global brand. So yes, we are looking to do that. Global doesn't necessarily mean every country in the world but in multiple markets. And ultimately we got to a point where we wanted to prove to ourselves that the platform we built, the technology that we own, our own IP, can that be converted or pivoted into other verticals as we've done with watches? Australia was an obvious choice for us. It's right hand drive market. We already saw quite a lot of big bidding activity of cars going backward and forward from Australia already. Actually it's a huge country, but it's a very small market in real terms. There's about a million collector cars there, there's 3 million in the UK, there's about 13 million in Europe and I think there's 47 million in the US. So if we want to grow to a sizable scale, then clearly we need to be more than just the UK. We need to be in Europe, we need to be in APAC as a region. For Hong Kong one of our senior consignment specialists has been with us for four years here in the UK, was moving to Hong Kong, so I gave him the opportunity to go and set us up out there. There's lots of people there. There's not so many cars, but it is a very rich economy. And we've also been doing for the last three years, a lot of business with Hong Kong buyers. A lot of Hong Kong buyers leave cars in the UK and Europe anyway, and it's a really poorly serviced market as well.

TDV: I know you've mentioned it a little bit here and I've heard you mention it in some other interviews as well, but it seems that there is a significant overlap between the car collecting and the watch collecting spaces. And are you seeing similar customers, similar habits, similar trends across both?

EL: More than similar, because ultimately in the watch space is an interesting one because there is no real competitor. eBay you could argue are, but I think if you've got a $50,000, a hundred thousand dollars Patek Philippe, eBay's probably not the place that you are drawn to think about selling your watch. The main dealers or the approved dealers or official dealers don't buy back used watches, they just want to sell you new watches and they have a 50% margin in them. So why on earth would they want to get into a marketplace business where they're making 5%? And actually, as I said, it's really hard building a company, building a brand from scratch. Good luck finding an influencer. Good luck finding a marketing strategy. Good luck finding a brand and a voice. We've built a watch business off the back of the best part of 200,000 registered users and over half a million social followers in the same way that Cars and Bids was built. Like, Hey, I've got 3 million subscribers, go check over here. I've got an auction platform.

And then the final thing there, you've asked about the US and I’m not sure  if you're aware of this, but we've been to the US once and we pulled out and we went to Canada and we pulled out, and I think there were two reasons for that. We just had the wrong staff. And when that originally happened, it was during Covid, so I could not travel to the US myself. And we got let down by a couple of people that we were hoping to work and partner with to start with. They got cold feet, but we thought let's just plow on anyway. And we just did it with the wrong team of people. So rather than make a fool out of ourselves, we just decided let's focus our efforts where we are and in Europe and Asia, while I would like to come back to the US, it is not a priority. And we would come back to the US almost immediately if we had the right team there or the right leadership to build that team out or potentially the right JV or partnership with an individual, a company, a brand, whatever that looks like. So we're always open to a conversation around that.

TDV: It seems that certainly with both the watches and the auto market, you've really focused in a bit on an elite marketing segment and that you have an average selling price that's higher than many of the competitors. Is your target on the sort of upper echelon of the market, is that intentional?

EL: Obviously you've used that word elite and upper echelon. Clearly we want those big cars and more from a PR perspective, it's no difference to Bring a Trailer, they sell a $3 million Bugatti, they make $5,000, but at least it puts a mark in the sand to say, we can sell these cars. You don't need to go to RM Sothebys, you don't need to leave it with Manhattan Motor Cars and let them take in probably the best part of $200,000 commission. We can sell these cars and only charge $5,000. So it is an important marketing tool, but we sold a car this morning for $900 in Australia, so we have a pretty broad spectrum of offerings. Clearly from an operating point of view, the effort put into consigning a $100,000 car is almost exactly the same effort as consigning a $10,000 car. So our focus should be at that end of the market you'd need to do, you'd need to consign 10 times more of the cars at the lower end. And actually someone's spending $10,000 on an auction platform, that's not a particularly wealthy person in most cases. So that $10,000 really means a lot to them. So if there's a mark on the wheel or a slight bit of miss description that most people on a $200,000 Ferrari would be like, oh, don't worry, it's just a stone chip. It's all the toys out the pram. You've got customer services looking after them and potentially looking to refund the fees and all for $500. Is it really worth it?

TDV: You're dealing with buyers and sellers that are all over the world. Have you noticed culturally or regionally differences between the way that buyers and sellers interact on how they focus or what they expect from sales? 

EL: There are many differences. Europe's the best way to describe that. We've got a single platform that yes, it uses multiple languages, which you can go and select, but the habits of a German seller are very different to the habits of a Spanish buyer. So if a Spanish buyer, buys a German cars, there's always going to be the potential for some confusion or misalignment on what they thought they were doing and why. Or let's just say the Spanish guy is writing on our platform in Spanish and in the messages and then the guy's not going to respond because he doesn't speak Spanish and he can't be bothered to use a translator tool and things like that.

And I think the other thing we've seen, people are fundamentally lazy. People really trust our brand. So most people bid and look at probably five photos and barely look at the description apart from the mileage. And of course it's our fault when they bought it and there's something different to what they thought they were buying because they didn't look at photo 64 and 89 and 123 and they didn't read the small print or the bold writing at the bottom say, this car is not registered in Germany. And those are issues that we see.

TDV: One of the things that I've found richest in some of these platforms is the comment sections. And sometimes it's who's commenting, sometimes it's the question that gets asked. Other times it's a seller who's just not participating. And often we see that as a reason that sales don't end up going through as the seller just doesn't show up. But we've definitely noticed with some of the UK sites in particular, that comments seem to get downplayed a little bit. 

EL: When you say downplayed, you mean not used?

TDV: Partly not used. But also I know on Collecting Cars after the auction closes, the comments are not visible. And I'm just curious as to whether that's more of you think a cultural thing or is that something else?

EL: It is a cultural thing. I think it's important we will come onto it. There's no point us comparing ourselves to Bring a Trailer. We're not bring a Bring a Trailer. We're a global site. We're not an American site. You imagine us having a hundred comments on a Ferrari Testarossa in multiple languages and people falling out or disagreeing. I guess I'll try to answer it in the most respectable way, but I think a lot of the comments that we end up attracting on the website are just nonsense. They're just not informative or educational. And they're also lazy. Like is this car VAT qualifying? Well, it says it in the description that it is. So we would be more than happy to keep the comments up there if we really felt they're relevant. We're not trying to hide anything in any shape or form, but there isn't the same level of engagement as the American audience. So why try and promote it?

TDV: And we touched on this a little bit, but you're dealing obviously with a lot of global transactions and that has a number of challenges to it that get added. But when buyers are transacting internationally, and you touched on the fact that people really trust Collecting Cars to be that trusted intermediary, but at the same time you don't own the car, you're just facilitating the buyer and the seller to connect. But there's a lot of trust that needs to be developed very quickly when somebody makes a high bid and then is expected to wire a significant sum of money for a car that they haven't seen yet. How have you adjusted to these factors? How have you made your community more comfortable with?

EL: Well, I think ultimately technology's only going to get us so far in that early journey of building out a business. You build trust based on people more than anything. I don't think technology's just going to deliver you trust. So we have people physically in all these countries speaking these languages. So when a car sells the next morning or most of our cars end in the evening, as you know, so the next morning they're going to get a telephone call, hi, it's Ben calling from collecting cars. I'm based here in Hong Kong. Congratulations for winning the car last night. Have you heard from the seller yet? Is there anything I can help with? So we are immediately interacting with all of our buyers and sellers holding their hands through the process.

TDV: I know we touched a little bit on competitive platforms, but there's obviously been a surge of new platforms in general when you're assessing competition and when you're looking at who else is in this landscape, do you primarily focus on the nuances of the UK market or really it must be a challenge to compare without having many other truly global platforms. Do you compare yourself more to some of the UK players or how do you adjust for things that you're doing on a global scale?

EL: I don’t want to give you what will sound like an arrogant response, but we no longer compare ourselves to any platform. We are our own business. We are building a product for the customer, not one to just look fancier than A or B platform. We've got a community, there's still a huge amount of growth available to us, and I think we are only going to do that by doing different things. And if we just start looking in our rear view mirror, whoever else is coming at us, I just don't think that's actually a good use of our time. So yeah, we've obviously got a tech team and a product team and we've got lots of great different people. I'm sure everyone's looking around at what other people are doing. But I can tell you the tabs I've got open on my computer and my desk is not all of our competitors.

One thing I would tell you though, if I had a home in America, I would be on Bring a Trailer and Cars and Bids most days buying cars. That's probably the most disappointing thing about all of our competitors. I'm not sure I'd want to buy any of the cars they have got listed. So that's why I don't go and look at them. I just don't find any of them interesting.

TDV: That said, regardless of UK or US or otherwise, I assume that you're monitoring and analyzing the moves and strategies of other companies and you see things that you like. You see things that you don't, obviously listing quality being high on that list in some cases, but do you sort of dive deep into some of the offerings and the innovations in the space or are you really just trying to chart your own course?

EL: Yeah, I'd be lying to say we absolutely never look, we'd be stupid not to just keep an eye on volumes and are we falling backwards? What are the sale rates looking like? Why was our night bad and theirs wasn't in trying to understand those different nuances, but there's also an awful lot that we can do without needing to add bells and whistles as such. And that's why speaking frankly, Bring a Trailer have taken so long to add any level of innovation onto their website is because actually none of that innovation was going to drive hockey stick growth. The hockey stick growth was engaging with their community and Cars and Bids, adding inspections and stuff that wouldn't have seen hockey stick growth. It might've improved their sale rate, might've improved a bit of trust, but not really the focus where our focus needs to be, which is driving engagement and revenue effectively.

TDV: And you touched on new tech developments. Obviously you see Bring a Trailer coming out with an app, you see new technologies on the horizon and the space is changing. Do you foresee things that are going to reshape or change the online car auction landscape that are on the forefront? 

EL: I think what we will see is the more fortunate businesses that are somewhat of an incumbent in their market or area and have product market fit, have the brand are generating enough sales to generate enough revenue to go and fund those improvements of the website, they will continue to do so and evolve by listening to their customers. I think someone launching what they deem to be a whizz bang auction website with all the bells and whistles without any understanding of what their customers really wants, I think it's just going to waste an awful lot of money and it won't work. There is no way Bring a Trailer, got to where they are today because they had an app. So for you to convince yourself you need an app, that's just the benefit of being a massive business, making a load of money that can go and justify building an app.

TDV: Looking forward, I know that you've introduced features like buy it now and your classified section. I particularly like the Coming Soon section and I'm avidly following many, many different sites. And I think that that ability to have a little bit more time to get to know something that's coming up to be able to follow and favorite and watch something that's going to be coming allows me to see something earlier. What other sorts of innovations, what other sort of things can users expect to see in the coming six to 12 months? Are there things that you plan to expand into on the horizon that you could share with the daily room community?

EL: I would like to be in a position without wasting too much time, money and effort to trial multiple different ways of selling someone's car. Now if you just host seven day auctions and you start seeing that it's not quick enough to interact with certain members of the trade, for example, because actually they just want to sell their car in 24 hours or 36 hours or any of the private individuals that use in the UK, WeBuyAnyCar.com and there's these companies where you type in your registration number mileage and they give you a quote immediately and you can turn up to a supermarket tomorrow morning and take cash. They need the money in 24 hours. So how can we compete in those areas? And then there are also going to be certain cars that need more time and that time might not just be in an auction, it might be other methods as well.

So we will look to offer some premium private sale offering, where ultimately I'm a car dealer. I've been in the business for my whole life, but before I started Collecting Cars, I was buying and selling multimillion pound cars around the world. So it's what I know, it's where I've come from. And interestingly enough, I've lost a few cars recently that probably aren't the right things to list on an auction for seven days. But historically I would've got those cars and I probably would've made a hundred or $150,000 in commission from selling them. And I'm disappointed I didn't sell them not for the $150,000, but I'm just disappointed I didn't sell them for the $6,000 that we would've got. And it just dawned on me that I should, there's no reason I should have to ignore that market that I left behind when I started Collecting Cars. So we are exploring that. It will be launched in a relatively MVP style because I think fail fast. I think us spending six or 12 months trying to develop a product that we're not convinced the customers need, but if we can spend that up in two or three weeks and they're like, Hey, I'll use that, then that's the sort of stuff we're looking at.

TDV: That makes sense. And obviously the auto auction landscape is always evolving. Have you seen any standout trends of the cars that are being listed? I know you've mentioned that you'd love to list a 300 SL gullwing. Have you managed to find one to list? Are there things that you see as particular standout trends in the space and with your global footprint? Are there certain market patterns or things that you're observing that may be more interesting on a global scale than they are necessarily visible at the local market scale?

EL: Well, look, there's lots of cars, I did say a 300 SL and I would've said at the time an F40, but just because we'd always said that's the type of car we'd like to drive. We've sold a couple of F40s now. We sold one in the UK a couple a couple of weeks ago, that was a UK auction record, 1.7 million pounds. It was at no reserve at 1.35 million pounds. So we delivered a massive result for the guy and charged him nothing to sell it and charged the $6,000 and RM Sotheby’s auction is tomorrow night in London. I'll pop along to the drinks party. They've got an F40, I think they'll struggle to sell it. I think they'll struggle because the seller probably wants too much money, like most sellers at the moment. And their fee of 12.5% is probably going to get in the way of them selling that car.

The other thing that's interesting, obviously until the rise of Bring a Trailer, let's say six years ago, where unless you are a real global car collector, you weren't highly aware of RM or Sotheby's & Bonhams, and you probably didn't go and study their auction catalogs and results. So you never really knew what these big expensive cars sold for. You just see them in magazines priced at two and a half million pounds. And even when you do see the results of two and a half million pounds, 250,000 pounds of that is fees. So that's not really what the owner netted back, with the transparency that the online auction platforms have bought. It has been, and no doubt is a massive thorn in the side for certain dealers. We, in October, November, December in 2022, we sold three F 12 TDFs. Over the course of a few weeks, all of those cars were bought speculatively off our website. They are all still for sale because they thought they knew better. And not just because we've set the market, maybe we have set the market you publicly, we've got a huge social following. So if you sell an F40 for 1.7 million pounds, that is the market price and however fancy a Ferrari dealership looks and you've got one for 2.2 million pounds, they're really going to struggle for buyers to disregard our sale results.

TDV: And in terms of buyer behaviors, you obviously have a unique vantage point. You've observed shifts in how buyers approach auctions. There is of course the traditional auction versus online auction that we've just talked about, but have you seen things in bidding patterns, in vehicle preferences, in even just the post pandemic world shifting sort of how people are viewing, collecting in general and buying and selling in an online environment?

EL: I think it's changing so fast. It's impossible to fix on any single pattern it is. I don't believe there is a pattern that we would be brave enough to follow.

TDV: Fair enough. And at The Daily Vroom, we're always diving into industry metrics as we talked about at the beginning. This is something that's a true passion of ours. One fascinating observation that we've had with respect to Collecting Cars is that especially when you compare to, and we've written quite a bit about Hemmings recently, but an established presence like Hemmings where there's obviously tons of traffic coming to their website, they're not a new name to the field, and yet they don't even come close to your sales numbers. How do you account for such a pronounced success that you are seeing with a much smaller traffic footprint overall?

It is a very good question. And clearly you can imagine we sit here very jealous of the organic traffic that some of these businesses have got and Hemmings, Car and Classic and to some extent Bring a Trailer. Doug DeMuro I think is an exception because of his YouTube audience, but because you can see the volume Doug selling is not wildly ahead of ours, and you're dealing in a single market with 45 million cars. So actually versus us, he should maybe be further ahead. But these other established businesses have got highly optimized SEO, they've got back links left, right, and center. So a lot of the traffic comes from organic Google search. So we just have a highly engaged audience. As I said, I'm a car dealer, we're here to sell cars and I think the high percentage of our traffic are here to bid, play, and engage with what we're doing. They don't know us from our incredible written content that we've been doing for the last 20 years. So we would love another million active users a month on the website, and that will come over time. But the traffic we have is very engaged, clearly.

TDV: And that being said, to your credit, there's a very rich archive of content on your website, which is unusual.

EL: There is, and also I think because we have Chris Harris, we are not all on our site. We put a 911K video out the other day. It's got 1.6 million views. We do a daily weekly podcast, as you know, it gets 50,000 downloads in a week. We've got very good engagement on our Instagram. So there's an awful lot of people seeing and interacting with us that don't necessarily need to come to the site to be involved in what we're doing.

TDV: Yeah, it it's quite a presence you've built. And in terms of KPIs and key milestones and things, The Daily Vroom is obviously somewhat obsessed with tracking key metrics. Things like sell-through rates have been very, very interesting for us to look at. Can you share some of the significant numbers and milestones and things that you feel are key to your success at Collecting Cars and the things that sort of keep you ahead of competitors?

EL: So we very much focus on number of lots we have listed because obviously when that's happening, it gives us an ability to draw more interested people in more organic awareness, word of mouth, et cetera. Sale rate is a challenge and as you can see that it's not just Collecting Cars struggling. It is anyone that's not Cars and Bids and Bring a Trailer. I think a lot of that's down to the market conditions in the UK. In Europe, each European country has different taxes, different rules about cars moving over the border. The UK coming into winter, it's not like we have East coast, West Coast. Well, there might be an active market in Southern California and Miami during the winter months where no one's bidding on things in Massachusetts because their driveway's under the snow.

And we've definitely seen and are seeing a pretty rapid decline in values and there's always a period of time of adjustment where sellers are convinced they'll get their money and then there becomes a time where there could be a mass exodus of like, I'll take whatever. And I hope it doesn't get to that, I hope it doesn't get to that for the seller's point of view. But ultimately if you're in the market to sell the car, there's only one way you can do it and that's accept what the market price is. And that market price has determined what a buyer's prepared to pay. And coming into the winter where dealers might be a bit overstocked, they might be caught out with cars they paid too much money for, they probably only want to take cars on consignment and not write a check for them. So you're left with us, so you're going to have to listen to what the two bidders are prepared to pay in the last minutes. And yes, yes, that value might be very different to what's advertised on cars.com or autotrader.com or your local Ferrari or Porsche dealer because the disparity between what a car is worth and what someone might be asking can be 20, 30, 40, 50% in some cases.

TDV: And something that we've seen on some of the auction sites is that they are, I don't know if migrating toward, but there certainly is a larger presence of some dealers on certain sites as opposed to others. Are you finding that most of your sellers are just individuals or are you starting to see a lot more dealers?

EL: We buy and sell with a lot of dealers and private individuals that is very market dependent. There's a lot more dealers that are using us in Europe, but they don't need to be so protected. The UK is a very small geographical area. So if you are in Bristol, Manchester, London, you’re three hours drive from each. This is nothing like America. And most of them are privately owned car dealerships. They own their cars, they own their buildings, and they see us as a big threat because they don't want to succumb to the pressure of their business model doesn't work.

And in America, all the dealers embrace it, actually they would prefer no one coming to their showroom and to shut up shop and just list on Bring a Trailer. Drive Source would be a good example, down in Houston doing his annual October Fest sale and annual gated cars, he'll spend three or four months amassing a collection of cars and list them all there at no reserve. Confident he'll get a result. To date that's not happening anywhere else in the world. I think we will see more people look to do that and ultimately they're either going to have to do it because if the dealers don't do it, the private people are just going to do it themselves. So the dealers are going to need to find a way of staying in existence by either starting up their own online auction platform, which will be very tough and I think they'll get bored off very quickly. Or finding a way to act as a middleman, which you are seeing growing actively on Bring a Trailer at the moment.

TDV: I know we touched upon this earlier, with comments showing after an auction takes place, this often tells a lot of the story of why a car maybe didn't sell or sold for what it ended up selling for. Are there any plans or considerations to showcase some of these things in the future?

EL: In November 2018 when we went and sat in our first web development meeting to build the platform, we obviously went through the entirety of the site and what our offering was. And I made a decision in that moment that we didn't deserve the right to advertise the fact that we had failed to sell someone's car at a price because we failed to do our job that we said to the seller that we would do our very best to help sell your car. And if his expectation was $50,000 and it was bid because that day the Queen died or there was an accident or the internet went down, there was a storm and it was bid to $32,000 and that car existed for the next six months in our unsold section for $32,000, it's going to make it very difficult for him to go and get his $50,000 if that's what it's truly worth. So I just made the decision that I didn't feel like we deserved the right to promote a car that we had failed to sell because I don't think that protected the seller sell.

TDV: We've talked a lot about competitors in the competitive landscape, and some people say that the digital car auction landscape is becoming saturated given the modest sales of even some of the established platforms. What do you see in the future for this space? Do you see mergers and consolidation? Do you see platforms dropping out? Do you see some other sort of evolution of the space?

EL: I think you'll see platforms dropping off. I think you'll see smaller ones try and come together to form a bigger one, but I'm not sure that'll work. You've got a lot of work with branding, identity, management, ownership. I just think there'll be such little value there and still needing so much time and commitment that it just won't be worth it. And I think you're just going to see a few key players. It's been very interesting and on some way I respect it, the RM Sotheby’s, Broad Arrow, they've really just decided to lean back into the traditional auction model and almost disregard that the digital auction model even exists. We aren't a digital auction model. We are physically at Pebble Beach. We charge 12.5%. It's uncapped. And from what we've seen over the last 24 months, they don't seem to have wavered. Broad Arrow growing, RM dominating Gooding have having very respectable results. And they've, the reason I respect them for making that decision is because I don't think RM can credibly have a auction platform on the side that's free to list and you charge 5% capped at $5,000 whilst they're prepared to charge someone $500,000 for selling their $5 million car.

TDV: Yeah, I think that there's something to being true to yourself as a company and understanding that this is what you are good at and this is where you see your market opportunity.

EL: They've all tried to do it though, as you've seen, they've all tried and they retracted very quickly. It will be interesting to see what Hagerty Marketplace does, which is a Broad Arrow business because I said to you why it didn't work for us in America. We had the wrong people. And this is not just about technology and brand. This is about people, drive determination, resilience, it's about so many different things.

TDV: Well, and I think we touched on a piece of this before and it made me think about it, but the traditional auction space was much less approachable. Anybody with a web browser can access these auctions in these new systems where to become a part of the auction community, aside from just watching from the sidelines, you really did need to be there with an approval processes in order to bid. There's a plus and a minus to that. On the one hand, if you sell through one of the established onsite auction houses, the chance of somebody sort of reneging and not having the funds to come through are minimized. 

EL: You might think that, but It is very easy to pull chandelier bids left, right, and center to fake sell cars for the seller to buy the car back. There's an awful lot of deals that don't complete post auction. And yes, in an ideal world, they want someone to turn up, but if they don't have that many, you might have a very busy auction room,

You might not have that many registered bidders on the night, and they are working very hard to find out who's interested in what. Do you want to come and view it? Do you need any more information? So they have a really good instinct whether is tonight going to be a good night or not? But there's an awful lot of smoke and mirrors in that game.

TDV: As our conversation comes to a close, I'd like to extend our heartfelt thanks to you, Edward, for sharing your valuable time and insights with us at The Daily Vroom. Your journey and vision are truly inspiring, and we eagerly anticipate witnessing the continued evolution and success of Collecting Cars.

EL: It's been my pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity to share our story with your readers. The road ahead is exciting, and we're just getting started. Keep an eye on us; there's much more to come.