Auction Stats - percentages sold and sale totals

DECEMBER AUCTION STATS

With previously postponed sales being moved into December, instead of there being only a few straggler fixtures in the first week of the month, the final month of the auction year was rammed with sales, leaving very little time for surviving office parties or a little Christmas shopping on the already disappearing High Streets.

In celebration of Scuderia Ferrari’s Milestone 100th GP, which took place at Mugello earlier in the truncated season, all 16 lots of Ferrari factory sourced memorabilia were auctioned on-line ‘Without Reserve’ and 100% sold to a global clientele, one of whom paid a more than festive £1,144,800 to secure a full-size 2020 Ferrari SF1000 F1 Show Car that never raced an inch!

Sale rates, the most accurate reality check on whether vendor’s reserves for more traditional classic auction fare were over-ambitiously unachievable or on the money, ranged from 91% at the 3m+ Bonhams motorcycle sales at Bicester Heritage to a far from West End 37% for top cars at the same firm’s New Bond Sale just four days later.

There were also buyers with £1.7m for 86% of the classic bikes offered by H&H during the final sale on the UK auction calendar at the National Motorcycle Museum beside the M42 in the Midlands.

But with a hugely over-ambitious Government proclaiming that magic vaccines will be pumped into at least the most vulnerable citizens’ arms by the spring, how bright is the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel?

With further versions of coronavirus multiplying faster than pharmaceutical manufacturers can mass-produce product, or sufficiently qualified injectors can be recruited for ‘Operation Roll-Out’, more of the socially-distanced on-line same will almost certainly be the auction norm for most of 2021, at least..

In the meantime, many more vendors will almost certainly still need to cash in redundant classics. Although whether as many new owners will be prepared to play with their mice, and actually bid to buy them, or be able pay for quite as many collector vehicles as they did in pandemic 2020, is as unfathomable as any futures market in a perfect storm. RH-E