The Daily Vroom

The Supply Side Problem

Most people in the collector car world spend their time talking about prices, record sales, and headline results, yet very few talk about liquidity, even though liquidity is the single factor that determines whether any of those prices can exist in the first place.

Without a steady, reliable flow of cars coming to market, an auction platform is not really a marketplace at all but simply a well designed website (if it’s even that!) with good photography, because bidders only show up when they know there will consistently be interesting inventory, and sellers only show up when they believe there will consistently be bidders, which means the entire system depends on maintaining both sides of that equation at the same time.

That balancing act is far more difficult than most people realize, and it is especially difficult for auctions.

In a traditional classified marketplace, the seller controls the process by setting a price above what they expect to receive and negotiating downward until the market clears, which gives them flexibility and psychological protection if demand softens, but auctions remove that control entirely and force the seller to choose between the risk of a no reserve result or the uncertainty of trusting a platform’s estimate of value and hoping that estimate is based on real data rather than someone’s opinion.

The uncomfortable truth is that there is still no reliable place where an owner can validate what their specific car is actually worth, which leaves many sellers cautious before they ever click submit, and that hesitation is exactly what creates the supply side problem every auction platform quietly battles every single day.

So the real question is not how auctions sell cars once they are listed, but how they convince cars to show up in the first place.

Because liquidity, not design or marketing or commentary, is the hardest part of this business.

Bring a Trailer

From the outside it often appears that cars simply materialize on BaT each morning, as though inventory refreshes itself overnight, but the scale and consistency of their daily listings are actually the result of a disciplined intake and curation machine that most users never see.

They receive far more submissions than they can possibly accept, and rejecting cars is not optional but necessary, because allowing too many similar examples to run at the same time would dilute bidding and undermine seller confidence, which means every listing slot becomes a strategic decision about quality, timing, and category balance rather than a simple yes or no.

What is particularly telling is that even the clear market leader cannot rely purely on organic momentum, which is why they continue to invest in television advertising along with constant social and digital marketing, offline events, podcasts etc.. to expand both the buyer and seller funnels, and the fact that the biggest player in the space still feels compelled to spend aggressively on acquisition should make it obvious that liquidity is never solved permanently and must be earned continuously.

If the largest platform still has to hustle for supply, nobody else gets to relax.

Here are some of the ads they are currently running.

Cars & Bids

Cars and Bids a few years back attacked the same liquidity problem from a more aggressive growth perspective, particularly after private equity capital entered the picture, when they pushed significant money into paid social and digital advertising with the belief that more reach would naturally translate into more sellers and more bidders.

For a while the strategy was simple volume, since if you flood the top of the funnel hard enough you assume listings will follow, but auctions rarely scale that cleanly because trust, reputation, and seller confidence matter just as much as traffic, and those qualities cannot be manufactured overnight with ad spend alone.

After scaling headcount and marketing spend, the company ultimately reset as they realized that social media marketing even with a huge spend was never going to give them enough sellers. So they did the typical PE play, slashed the team, and tightened operations, and what is more interesting now is how they appear to be rebuilding the growth engine with a more integrated approach that treats liquidity as a systems problem rather than a campaign problem.

You can see that thinking directly in their hiring language of the job we highlighted yesterday, where they describe the role as:

“Integrated growth and brand ownership: drive how content, partnerships, events, social, paid marketing, and lifecycle work together to deliver results.”

That sentence reads less like a job description and more like a blueprint, because it signals a shift toward coordinating every touchpoint that builds trust and awareness so that when someone finally decides to sell a car, Cars and Bids feels like the obvious first call.

Liquidity at scale comes from brand gravity and relationships, not simply impressions and clicks. The next two quarters will be key to see i they’re moving in the right direction where they can grow their listings to 40-50 per day.

Here are some of their ads they are running.

SOMO

SOMO has taken a noticeably different path by focusing on fewer, higher quality cars, which on paper makes complete sense given the pedigree and global reach of RM Sotheby’s (who are now the majority owners), because one would reasonably expect an almost built in pipeline of inventory flowing from the live auction business to the online channel.

Every major house sees cars that are either too small, too modern, or simply not quite right for a flagship live sale, and an online venue should be the natural home for that middle ground, which means the parent company relationship ought to provide SOMO with a structural sourcing advantage that most competitors could only dream of.

From the outside, however, that steady pass through is not as visible as you might expect.

Rather than seeing a constant stream clearly routed from RM, the mix appears thinner and more dealer heavy, with fewer private party listings than the brand’s footprint would suggest, which raises the possibility that those leads are not consistently flowing between the two channels or that they are operating more independently than many assume.

It may be a deliberate choice or simply a function of internal priorities, but in auctions momentum matters, and without a reliable cadence of compelling cars, bidder energy softens and sellers hesitate, which makes liquidity progressively harder to build.

It will be really interesting to see what SOMO do next, as they can’t rely just on a few dealerships. Time for RM to step up?

Hemmings

Hemmings may be the most intriguing case of all, because few brands possess their level of history, trust, and built in audience, which should theoretically provide a structural advantage when it comes to sourcing inventory for auctions.

Yet despite those advantages, their auction presence is minimal compared to the rest of the market. While they experiment with promotions and member perks, the overall execution feels less urgent than competitors who treat auctions as their core business rather than one channel among many. The number of auction listings is extremely sparse, and from the outside it looks like untapped potential, because the audience, the relationships, and the data are already there, and if those assets were fully activated, liquidity should follow naturally.

Here are some of their ads. I’ll let you compare BaT, C&B & now Hemmings ads to see what you feel are the most compelling.

Hagerty Marketplace

Hagerty takes a quieter but arguably more strategic route, since their core business is insurance rather than auctions, which gives them something more valuable than flashy campaigns, namely a massive database of real owners and real cars that they already have relationships with.

That built in network appears to be translating into steady sourcing over the last year as the liquidity in their listings has been higher than previously, particularly with collections and regional consignments, and while they may not dominate the daily conversation, the consistent flow of inventory suggests a relationship driven model that may ultimately prove more durable than pure advertising.

Liquidity built on trust tends to last longer than liquidity built on paid reach. Can they now scale this to get to a consistent 10/20 listings per day?

DuPont live

The newest entrant, duPont’s live auction platform, has chosen an all no reserve structure paired with a buyer friendly return policy, which is an interesting experiment but also one that naturally raises the bar for seller confidence, since convincing owners of high value cars to accept pure market risk without an established bidder base is inherently challenging.

At the moment all of the inventory appears to come from internal sources rather than external consignors, and until outside sellers begin participating consistently, long term liquidity will remain the central hurdle.

The bigger takeaway

Across every platform, regardless of size, brand strength, or strategy, the same issue keeps surfacing. Auctions depend on convincing sellers to accept uncertainty, and uncertainty naturally slows supply.

Some platforms buy attention with ads, some lean on heritage, some build relationships, and some rely on internal inventory, yet none of them have truly solved liquidity, because the fundamental question every seller asks is still the same.

What is my car actually worth?

Until that answer is transparent, credible, and genuinely data driven at the individual vehicle level rather than based on platform opinion, supply will always be harder than demand.

Before you can run great auctions or set record prices, you first have to solve what sounds like the “simplest” problem in the business, which is also the hardest one to crack. You have to get the cars.

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