8 minute read
Dan Norris
dannorris
This is a rainy day. Let’s make hay while the sun shines…
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Last month a gentleman came into the showroom, and perhaps feeling that he should explain why he had decided to buy a car at this precise moment (note to the general public; please don’t feel the need to explain, a credit card will suffice), he came out with one of the classic quotes of 2020. ‘I’ve been putting money aside for a long time, you know, for a rainy day. If this doesn’t constitute a rainy day, then I don’t know what does.’ And you can’t help but see his point. He may not be alone in this approach, and this may help explain the second biggest surprise of the year – the first one being an unexpected pandemic that shut down the world.
During lockdown, we said many things – the world would change irreversibly for the better – we’ve seen how nice the planet looked without pollution, so we’d never let it go back to what it was. Until we want to go to the beach at Bournemouth. We’ve seen what a waste of time going to work was, so from now on we’re going to work from home. But now the dressing gown needs a wash after wearing it for two months straight, and perhaps having colleagues - and even a boss - seems better than endless Zoom meetings whilst trying to clean the bath and simultaneously teach two children about the Spanish Armada. We’ve seen the dangers of obesity, and we’re going to do something about it - until Maccy D’s opens again and we have government food vouchers in our hands.
Not having children, I was able to spend the time looking at forecasting for the financial year ahead. You can imagine that with showrooms closed around the country and people somewhat preoccupied with trying to breathe, my predictions for car sales for the 12 months ahead were, shall we say, restrained. But as with so many things we predicted from the confinement of our universal house arrest, that was all nonsense. It turned out people really wanted to buy cars. Before the showroom even officially opened on June 2nd, we’d made up for all the sales that hadn’t happened during lockdown – people trusted our word on the condition of the cars without having to see them. By the time we’d been open two weeks we’d reached our forecast target for the whole summer. We haven’t seen business like this since before the Brexit vote in 2016, and it isn’t just at Munich Legends. The whole motor trade is rushing around to try to keep up with demand, everyone wearing the same slightly confused look of ‘why now?’ combined with ‘thank God’. But there’s a newcomer to the business, an incumbent that’s got me even more confused. The online auction.
Now, readers of this column (both of you) will know that in my professional capacity, I’m not a fan of the traditional car auction. My feeling is that car auctions, to be frank, are where the motor trade puts cars that they don’t want to retail from their showrooms. We see all too often the aftermath of these events – often a large percentage of the BMWs that go under the hammer end up at ML for a post purchase inspection – and it’s often pretty ugly. Cars described as ‘probably one of the best examples
available on the market today’ which turn out to be barely roadworthy and with the paint peeling off, or cars mooted as being part of this or that famous ‘collection’ when actually the bloke bought it in another auction two years earlier, put it into storage and then decided he didn’t want it after all. I suppose it’s the lack of accountability on the part of the auction house that really grates – ‘read our small print, we just pass on what the customer told us’ – I can tell you categorically that if we took everything sellers told us and put our name behind it without checking, we’d have gone bust years ago. Surely if the statements are true, you can stand by them. If they’re not, don’t print them. But printing statements that are unverified, as if they are the truth, and then effectively saying ‘this may be lies’ does seem a little bit like sharp practice. Or maybe I’m being too fussy.
Of course, you can go and see the car before the auction. But if I had a dollar for every car I’ve seen on the ground and thought ‘looks lovely’ only for a technician to run up a five grand hitlist – I’d be on the beach rather than writing this article. During lockdown, the demise of one of the country’s biggest auctioneers brought all this into sharp relief – and may just about sum up the whole sorry business. Pre lockdown, I had an 850CSi at ML, dropped off by the
owner in the hope we’d find a home for it. It wasn’t a nice car, and the cost of putting it right far exceeded the value the owner would recover in a sale. So, having been given the bad news, things followed the usual pattern. ‘Should I put it in an auction?’ Coys of Kensington had one coming up, so we helped the owner prepare the car for their sale. What we didn’t know was that the clouds were starting to darken for Coys. Apparently, they’d sold a very expensive vintage Porsche to a canny collector, and it wasn’t the car they’d said it was. This time the new owner wasn’t buying the ‘we don’t stand by our statements’ line, and decided to sue – for a six-figure sum. Apparently undeterred by this, Coys went about collecting cars for their auction, and went ahead with the sale. Except when they’d sold everyone’s cars, instead of paying the sellers, they went into administration. I don’t know who I feel worse for – the guy driving around in a shocking 850CSi thinking it’s one of the best in the world, or the guy that thought he’d sold the car, only to have lost the lot.
So why anyone would think that taking it a stage further – buying a car from an online auction platform, with little or no legal protection, no pre-purchase inspection report, and only the website’s repetition of the seller’s opinion of the car, which they clearly say they do not legally stand by – is a good idea? Even the sales pitch of some of these websites is arguably disingenuous. They claim that the seller pays no fee, which, you have to admit, does sound attractive. They can even claim that the price a car ‘sold’ for is, say, £50,000 when the buyer had to pay £53,000 to actually drive the car away. By my basic maths, if your buyer pays 53 grand for the car in total and you, the seller, have trousered 50, you’ve paid a 3 grand fee for the sale. You can attribute that cost to whichever side of the deal sounds best in the pitch, but the money comes out of the sale all the same.
So, with the ‘new normal’, and the current trend for buying and selling cars through anonymous websites, what is my prognosis for the traditional model as operated by Munich Legends and our contemporaries? Well, actually, it’s rather upbeat. I believe most sensible buyers want an expert opinion on a purchase as significant as a collectable car. Most people want the seller - the people who’ve given you that expert opinion - to stand by their claims, and to be accountable if things don’t work out. I believe people want legal protection. I believe people want to deal with someone they can meet face to face, to buy without being pressured by a deadline or other people competing in the purchase. I believe that people generally understand that when a deal is too good to be true, it usually isn’t true. I also believe that all things have a pattern, and it won’t be long before the harsh reality of buying a car blind from an unaccountable online platform hits home. The ‘new normal’ of replacing the warmth of human interaction with a digital facsimile will wear thin. It turns out that as human beings, we may need each other more than we thought. Especially on those rainy days…
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