Classic Car Auction Yearbook 2023-2024

It’s landed. After months of painstaking research, the annual tradition that is Adolfo Orsi’s exhaustive work on developments in the classic car market at public auction has been published. In a 430-page hardback volume, Orsi examines a business that has grown from 1,521 cars totalling $27m in 1993 to today’s market where 11,313 classics generated a gross of more than $2 billon for the 12 months ending immediately after Monterey Week this August.

As always, it’s a must-have and the perfect companion to a K500 subscription.

After the regular business overviews from the major industry players, it’s straight into one of the most interesting sections of the book: Adolfo Orsi’s take on trading 2023-2024. Over 14 pages, his analysis covers all the metrics including percentage of cars sold by country (US and UK is down, Euro zone up), number of cars offered and sold (the gap has widened; 11,300 offered vs. only 7,900 sold) and number of vehicles sold over $1million (311 2023-2024 vs. 340 2022-2023).

As K500 has reported all year, more cars and more events does not mean better prices achieved and a commensurate increase in turnover.

Online auctions are included to an extent never previously seen, and Orsi notes the ‘turbo’ effect of internet sales that boosted values immediately post-Covid. The period 2021-2022 saw prices and activity rise accordingly, with the cooling off witnessed 2022-2023 due to increased interest rates and a return to normal life after the pandemic continuing in 2023-2024. Orsi concludes that “the market is resilient, more reflective and selective” now and that it’s “definitely a buyers’ market for 99% of models”.

All the usual rankings are there, including the top 311 cars of the current season. There’s a table of makes and countries ranked by turnover – no prizes for guessing ‘Ferrari’ and ‘Italy’ comes out top there. Blue Chip models such as the 300 SL ‘Gullwing’, Porsche 959 and Ferrari F40 have their own graphs. The biggest takeaway in this section – as you can see 24/7 on K500 – is that more recent Ferrari supercars have soared since 2019 but 1960 classics like the 250 GT Lusso have never recovered from the heights of 2014-2015 and continue to fall in value. The Dino GT and GTS are the exceptions to that trend.

The sales descriptions and photos of the top 10 results of 2023-2024 are reproduced, leading with RM’s $51,705,000 1962 Ferrari 330 LM/250 GTO. The majority of the book comprises every auction result listed alphabetically by make and model, chassis number, date sold/not sold and price realised in $USD/£STG/EUR.

At the end of the work Orsi lists the top five cars every year from 1993 ($1,762,500 1912 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost) to late-2023’s big-selling Ferrari GTO. It finishes with a fascinating 1993-2024 top twenty: the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR coupé heads it at the equivalent of $142.7m; in 20th place is the 1939 Alfa Romeo 8C berlinetta sold by Artcurial in 2019 for a dollar value of $19.0m. Half the cars are Ferraris.

The Classic Car Auction Yearbook 2023-2024 is available from all good specialist booksellers including Hortons.

Photos by K500