The Hagerty Market Rating Inches Toward “Flat” Territory

The Hagerty Market Rating measures the current status of the collector car market in terms of activity or “heat,” directional momentum, and the underlying strength of the market. It is expressed as a closed 0-100 number with a corresponding open-ended index (like the DJIA or NASDAQ Composite). To learn more about how we calculate the Hagerty Market Rating, read here.

Another month, another decrease in the Hagerty Market Rating. This time, the 0.44-point drop pushed the Market Rating down to 61.47, its lowest point in three and a half years. While the Market Rating is still in the “expanding market” range, it will likely fall into the 50s by the end of the year. A rating of 50 indicates a “flat market.”

The Hagerty Market Index, an open-ended stock-market-style version of the Market Rating, dropped 3.71 points this month. This was the largest single-month drop since early 2023, when the index started to descend from its all-time high. Since its peak in December 2022, the Hagerty Market Index has dropped 16 percent.

A month out from Monterey, the Market Rating's auction component metrics continue to fall. The Overall Auction Activity metric dropped 2.2 points, retreating back to spring 2021 levels. The Number of Cars Sold at Auction metric is down to January 2022 levels and the Median Sale Price dropped 3 points this month to 26.64—its lowest level to date. However, inflation is no longer the main culprit. The actual median sale price dropped $525 this month to $27,825—its lowest true value in over four years.

That's not to say inflation doesn't still pull down other components of the Market Rating. While the average sale price between private parties increased slightly this month, it was unable to outpace the monthly inflation rate of 0.18 percent. Similarly, all four macro-economic indicators used in the Market Rating increased this month, but their combined inflation-adjusted metric fell 0.06 points.

Earlier this month, a new quarterly update of the Hagerty Price Guide was released. Many values are down from where they were this summer. Average and median condition #3 ("good") values have dropped to their lowest points in over 10 years when adjusted for inflation, with broad market cars taking the brunt of the value loss. The Hagerty Hundred, a weighted average of the #2 ("excellent") condition value of the 100 most commonly insured vehicles in the Hagerty Price Guide (the full list is available here), dropped for the eleventh consecutive month to its lowest point since Summer 2013. On the other end of the market, the Blue Chip index, which consists of the average #2 condition value of 25 high-end classics, fared much better, sliding just half a point, erasing only three months of growth.

The industry experts we talked to feel the current state of the market is a little soft, citing recent underwhelming auction performance. The "buy anything" energy during the pandemic is largely gone. Our experts suggest that many owners of high quality cars are reluctant to submit their cars to the harsh judgment of bidders in a softening market and that an uncertain future is causing a large group of buyers to sit on their hands. Large auctions will pick up again in January, which will give us an ever clearer view of the market. Until then, expect the Hagerty Market Rating to fall a few more points.