John,
During the period you describe, I didn't so much run into wealthy neophytes
trying to buy cars for themselves, as much as constantly running into
"dealers" who posed as private buyers, who were primarily buying the cars for
resale in Europe and Japan. They were practically a plague on the landscape.
The names and characteristics of these types, who generally were offering more
than US market value, were circulated furiously at shows, throughout the
clubs, and over the fledgling web lists. There was a very real distain among
owners for these frauds who were "exporting "our" LBCs".
At the time, their ads, offering to buy the cars "at top dollar" were every
where in publications like Hemmings etc.
David W. Jones
'62 Mk II BT7 tricarb
Cumberland, RI USA
----- Original Message -----
From: John May
To: scotyp@comcast.net
Cc: healey list
Sent: Thursday, December 16, 2004 1:07 AM
Subject: Re: Healey Values
There was a major "correction": in the US stock market in the late 80's,
around 88 or 89. I don't remember the numbers but I remember that it
was bad and really shook confidence in the stock market. A lot of money
went looking for someplace else to hide. The idea of putting it into
gold, antiques, and especially appreciable classic cars really took
off. At the time most of our local club members were approached by
brokers and speculators, new names on the scene, people who knew nothing
but the names of cars and the popular "BJ_" nomenclature. They had no
passion or interest in the cars, were just looking to turn a quick
buck. We had methods of screening them out, since they pretended to be
true enthusiasts. Ferrari's that had been $50k went to $200k-$400k, and
the typical nice E-type roadster went to about $100k. Healeys, MG's etc
followed the upward spiral. I know a shop that was converting E-type
coupes to Roadsters, which was easy on the V-12 models according to what
I saw there. When the bubble burst in the early 90's the folks who
took the worst beating were the ones with the high dollar Ferrari's and
E-Types. It was also about 93 that Eastern Airlines went out of
business, as I remember, which compounded the bust. It was amazing how
many collector cars Eastern pilots had, and a lot of nice cars hit the
market at bargain prices, if you had the money and space (which I
didn't). Most of us were glad to see the return to sanity, since we
weren't planning to sell our cars anyway.
John
|