Most off Packard price guide, like, ever

Keith Martin's Sports Car Market Pocket Price Guide has expanded its Packard section for 2015. According to the new price guide, a 1932 Packard Twin Six open model in very good condition should be worth between $65k and $80k. According to the guide, it's worth less than a '39-'41 120 open model, which it says should be worth $85k to $105k.

If anyone out there has a Twin Six and $20k in cash and wants to upgrade to a 120, let me know and I would be happy to arrange a trade.

I remember looking at a price guide not that long ago, where they listed a 1909-1910 Pierce Arrow at something like $50,000.....at a time when they were well over $100K and climbing!

Like you, I wanted to find the seller!!!

ALL price guides are worthless.

Keith's price guides are very good on Ferraris, Alfas, Vettes. They are pretty good on Mercedes- not always accurate, but in the ballpark. They don't seem worth much on Packards- I think they don't sort out the distinctions between models.

I have never seen a price guide that was worth much on prewar cars. It may be that the numbers of cars are small enough that the only thing that really matters is actual sales, which you can only get from auction and private sale results. Private sale results are very hard to track down. Hagerty might have them, but their guides don't include prewar cars.

His prices for prewar Mercedes are way off. You are right that the numbers and variations with prewar cars make them impossible to accurately track.

His prices for prewar Mercedes are way off. You are right that the numbers and variations with prewar cars make them impossible to accurately track.

I thought about this since the prior post. The private treaty sales of high-end cars don't affect collectors in my bracket- I can't speak for anyone else here, obviously. I don't own anything that valuable and I don't ever expect to (although I do get a serious jones when looking at thirties Twelves, and wish I had one) What would really be helpful in establishing values is knowledge about sales of cars that matter to most collectors- not just auctions, but private sales, dealer sales, etc.

I know that Hagerty (and probably some of the other insurance companies such as Heacock, Grundy, Chubb etc) have access to approximate purchase values of cars that they are asked to insure. I believe some of this information finds its way into the Hagerty price guides. SCM and others have compiled information about auction sales, but there is a certain amount of fudging that goes on with post block sales when cars don't sell at auction and a private deal is made.

I've noticed lately that a lot of desirable cars are advertised with no price, and notation that says "POA". To me, that means that the prices are moving fast enough that the dealer doesn't want to get caught out by advertising a car at a given figure, selling it, and then discovering that the one after that one sold for ten percent more. So they call around frequently trying to figure out what comparables are selling for. If their competitors will tell them, that is.

If you are familiar with Yachtworld, which is the largest on-line boating marketplace, they have a feature that yacht brokers can subscribe to called "Soldboats.com". It isn't always accurate, but it is useful, and very often information about what boats are really selling for is in there. I wish we had something like that for the vintage car market.

Price guides are dead-on accurate when you're a buyer and wildly pessimistic when you're a seller, right?

Sure, on a Mustang or a Camaro or a Model A or something that changes hands often enough to create a reliable metric, a price guide is probably fairly accurate. But a '32 Twin Six? How many of those change hands each year? Three? Four? Surely less than ten, and a majority of them change hands privately so nobody knows the real numbers. At that point the number becomes pure speculation. They're putting a number on the car because they can't have a zero, but the math is more flawed than Hollywood bookkeeping.

On some cars, the prices are actually moving faster than the guides can be updated. We recently sold a '56 Jaguar XK140 OTS. I did my research and saw that auction results were going up by $10-15,000 per year since 2011 or so. I looked at what else was on the market, and yes, I checked the price guides (NADA, Old Cars, Hagerty, and Sports Car Market) to get an idea. All of those various data points said that the car should sell for around $90-92,000. So I listed it at $99,000.

It sold in less than two hours on eBay for full asking price.

The new owner came to collect it personally and loaded it and vanished within minutes, not wanting to stick around and chat. I talked to him later to find out how he liked the car (loves it) and discovered that he is a rather well-known Jaguar collector with a large collection of similar cars. Anyway, he felt the car was under-priced by perhaps $15,000 and was afraid I'd wise up and refuse to let him take it. That's not how I work, but his point was well-made. The values are moving so fast on certain cars that what seems like a ridiculous price today will be eminently reasonable in fairly short order.

I'm frankly tired of people waving price guides in my face. I'll admit that one of my secret pleasures is to talk to a price guide buyer about a car, have him decide that I'm crazy, only to sell it a short time later to someone who sees value in the car. Eventually price guide guy calls back (they always do, because there are never any cars priced like it says in the guide). At that point I take secret delight in telling him that it sold for a figure above the guide's number. They're always surprised, yet they always ask me to tell them first if I get another one. Why is that?

The Corvette we recently sold was priced about $10,000 higher than a knowledgeable multi-owner Corvette enthusiast told us it was worth. We never even looked in the price guides. Just a gut feeling for a good solid car that would be a lot of fun without restoring. It sold within a week for the asking price.

I personally value rust-free, solid and complete cars WAY higher than what knowledgeable appraisers say. That kind of car is very usable as-is. The appraiser would say it's in class 3/4 condition. The reason the price guide is useless on that kind of car is because the type of person that buys it is COMPLETELY 100% different than a guy who wants a numbers-matching show car. It can be looked at in this way: You can buy a good solid reliable collector car for $25,000, enjoy it, and not worry about it losing value because more than likely it won't, or, you can buy a good solid late-model used car for $25,000, enjoy it, and see it worth $5,000 in just a few years.

I have never seen a price guide that was worth much on prewar cars. It may be that the numbers of cars are small enough that the only thing that really matters is actual sales, which you can only get from auction and private sale results.

There's something to that generally, although I don't think that was going on here. Just based on a quick skim, published auction results for '32 Twin Six open cars in the last year were the following:

$737,000: http://www.goodingco.com/vehicle/1932-packard-twin-six-905-coupe-roadster/

$330,000: http://www.rmauctions.com/lots/lot.cfm?lot_id=1060486

Even if those were unusually nice cars, especially the 1st one, it's hard to square that with a $65-80k estimate for a more common one. As far as I can tell, the only thing you can get in an open '32 Twin Six for the $65k-80k range described in the price guide is an engine: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1932-Packard-Twin-Six-V12-Twelve-1933-1934-1935-1936-1937-1938-1939-Super-8-/181526571590