Figuring Out Florida
Hi Friends!
So, the 2025 Florida auctions are now in the rear view and needless to say a lot occurred. There was definitely some bright spots and a few not so bright spots too, but it would be difficult to argue with the fact that the landscape in Florida is now different and that largely affects the broader picture and the way that Florida’s annual contributions to the market data set should likely be processed.
THE EVENTS THEMSELVES
First of all, it’s kind of difficult to call this a car week now. What’s happening here is really two separate things, with two separate markets in two largely different environments that are 400 miles apart (which for comparison, is further than the distance from Phoenix to LA). Although there’s obviously bleed over, RM’s ModaMiami is looking like a currently self-contained microsystem that definitely feels like it has the potential to spread. It’s difficult to see where Amelia goes on the other side though. At this point, Amelia Island car week is really only like five events (seven if you count Riverie and Cars and Community) and although it’s still obviously important to the marketplace overall, it’s definitely moving in the opposite direction.
I don’t think I’m the only one that’s sort of theorized over the last couple of years that there’s going to be a generational split that happens between the two. The older stuff will stay more relevant in Amelia whereas newer things will gain traction in Miami. I think it’s too soon to really tell if that hypothesis is panning out, but this year was very different than last year for certain.
OVERALL PICTURE
First off, I think it’s important to note that at the time of writing, Broad Arrow and Gooding Christie’s are likely still negotiating post sale situations and it’ll likely still be a few days before we have their final overall totals (these will almost assuredly be the lead stories in next Friday’s Z260 News). This said, I think enough has been done where we have a pretty good idea of what happened here and a lot of it is good. According to the folks at Hagerty, this series of Florida events were as good as it’s ever been and although there were less events overall (Bonhams has since departed all of it in favor of F1 in Miami in May), the numbers remained (minus their 2024 contribution). $190.3 million in total sales (up from $177.7 in 2024) on 391 offered with 340 sold for an 86% sell through rate. This was up from 333/389 and 85.6% in 2024. Average sale price was also up $26,174 dollars as well. Obviously, RM Sotheby’s has rolled up the red carpet in Miami and we know that they produced $74.5 million in total sales with a top sale of a 1966 Ford GT40 Mark IV for $13,205,000. By all intents and purposes, they had a very successful couple of days with Thursday really hitting it out of the park. Regardless of what Gooding can put together post sale, I suspect RM (and by default ModaMiami) will still walk away the big winners in Florida this year.
RESULTS BY SEGMENT
There were clear divisions and differences in activity by price and that had a real, clear effect on what happened here. I think this, more than anything else really indicates where things are moving too.
$0 -$300,000
Few bright spots here. Although, there was a couple of pretty solid things to be excited about with sports cars from the early 2000s, this was a difficult place to be. Things like the Ford Mustang Cobra collection at Broad Arrow brought reasonable money and things like late ’90s and early 2000s Porsche examples did well too. We also saw some strong results on things like Ferrari 360s. On the other end of that was the proverbial standards in the market, like Jaguar E-types and XKs and Mercedes 190 SL and Pagoda SL. They all clearly slid backwards here. Although, it’s hard to deny how wonderful these cars are, I think this is kind of somewhat of a marketplace correction, as they made a lot of all of these, there’s a lot of extremely highly restored examples available and for a long time they seemed to be climbing well beyond the territory of overpriced. Late ’80s and early ’90s European wall poster type cars like 512/Testarossa, Mercedes AMG, etc, curiously enough didn’t do great either. I suspect a lot of this was circumstantial however and I have a bit of a difficult time believing that this segment has already come and gone. Elsewhere, there was a couple of pretty good sales on a few pre-war cars, but overwhelmingly those struggled in this range and did much better higher up the food chain.
$300,000-$1,000,0000
This was difficult territory too and probably no man’s land for a lot of reasons. Cars here pretty universally failed to hit their low estimates and although to a degree we saw the opposite in Arizona, I think it was just a situation where it was too many of the wrong cars that are going in the wrong direction in the marketplace at the same time. Hard to say if this was better or worse than the low end, but it wasn’t great either way.
Over $1,000,000
This is definitely where the action was for two of the three auction houses in Florida this year. As we all saw, RM absolutely hit it out of the park on Thursday night, achieving high estimate or above on basically all of the glory cars in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum Collection. One could certainly say that the special nature of those cars ensured they were always going to do well, but that Thursday night felt a little bit different and it felt like something we hadn’t seen in quite a while: the high end waking up and coming back to work. Same could be said for Gooding Christie’s on both Thursday and Friday of their sale. Although, they stepped on a couple of nails in the process (which I think were initially speculated to sell quite a bit higher than they probably should have been), Gooding did exceptionally well on all of their marquee cars and sold almost all of them towards the high range of their pre-auction estimates too. With this, this is really saying something, as Gooding does tend to be a little bit excitable when it comes to putting pre-auction estimates into play, so they definitely did well overall here. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for Broad Arrow. They had kind of a tough couple of days and their star cars (1954 Jaguar D-Type Works car and 1959 Ferrari 250 California Competitzione) both sold for multiple millions of dollars below initial estimates, with the Jag being especially painful as it crossed the block for $4,295,000. This was about $3,000,000 less than it probably should have brought and somebody definitely got a deal here. Overall however, I think this is where the strength is in the market right now and for the most part what happened here is what needed to happen and in some cases, much more.
THE NO RESERVE NIGHTMARE
Across the board, at every event, sellers that ran their cars at no reserve, took an absolute beating. If you’re a buyer, this was great news for you, but I suspect we’re going to see a recoil and it’s going to be more difficult to get consigners to go no reserve for a while as a result. Based on what I saw this week, it would be difficult to recommend to anyone that they go all in on anything right now, unless there is absolutely no other option. The no reserve tag just doesn’t seem to wind buyers up like it used to and I think results in Florida this year definitely spoke to that.
THE TAKEAWAY
There was a lot to process in Florida this year (and likely to be more) and a lot of things going in multiple directions at the same time. This is one of the more complicated auction weeks that I can recall seeing for a while, but from my perspective however, one thing was made abundantly clear. We are in the early stages of a pretty heavy-duty top-down type of marketplace. Mid-range is sliding, a lot of reserves were being pulled really early there and at the low end, but the star cars really shined. We’re entering a type of market that is really favorable for high end buyers with significant amounts of expendable cash who can take advantage of the anxiety and in many cases real world discomfort happening elsewhere. As the economy tightens on people below this altitude even further, expect to see the divide widen even more. Although the types of cars have definitely changed, this to me looked like the kind of sales that we would have seen somewhere in the general area of like 2008’ish. As we all know, shortly after that, the marketplace experienced the best years that it’s likely ever had. Am I saying that this is going to be repeated note for note and go exactly that way again? Probably not. We’ve got an incoming generation with less disposable income then the previous and things like cryptocurrency and other largely more recent entries into the alternative investment realm could be distract future buyers from entering into this market altogether. However, as the stock market clearly moves towards more instability, that tends to favor this marketplace as well. I’m not sure what’s going to happen next, but I think there’s things out there that indicate that positive things are coming this direction. There’s definitely going to be winners and there’s going to be losers however, so try to align yourself accordingly, buy smart and hope for the best.
That’s it for this week……
Darin Roberge