Just the Facts: How Data Drives Hagerty’s Bull Market List

Each December, we put together the Hagerty Bull Market List, our annual selection of the collector-car hobby’s movers and shakers. Basically, it’s a group of 10 or so cars (with the occasional truck and motorcycle thrown in) that the data tells us are poised to grow in value over the next 12 months. This isn’t investment advice per se—rather, an opportunity to point out that, with some due diligence and a smidge of luck, you can experience the joys of the collector-car hobby and maybe get your money back or a bit more when it’s time to sell. We’ll reveal the 2025 Bull Market list on December 9, 2024. In the meantime, check out the 2024 Bull Market list.

We’ve been making Bull Market picks for eight years now and its about time we talk about data. Not how we use the data to make our picks (read more about that here), but the sheer quantity of data we use.

Hagerty’s Automotive Intelligence team has more data at our disposal than the rest of the classic car industry thanks to Hagerty’s massive insurance database as well as a couple of other novel sources. So, what exactly makes Hagerty’s data different?

Typical market analysis across the classic car industry focuses on publicly available auction data. Public auctions result in about 65,000 classic car sales per year. A lot of insight can be gleamed from these sales; however it this is a small slice of the pie and can only tell you what vehicles are worth in the current moment. Since our Bull Market list is predictive in that it points out cars poised to grow in value in the future, looking at recent public sales is only part of the picture when making our selections. The vast majority of cars change hands privately or through dealers, where sales prices are hidden. While Hagerty has a robust auction database of nearly 700K transactions spanning multiple decades, it is only a fraction of what is available to our valuation analysts…

Insurance Quotes

As a classic car insurance provider, we are in a unique position. When someone wants to know the cost of insuring a classic car, they share with Hagerty basic demographic information and, most importantly, what they think the car is worth. As this process is often started before they officially purchase the vehicle, it predates any visible auction transaction and is more often tied to a vehicle that will be purchased privately. We watch changes in quote demographics and vehicle values as an indicator for future value movement of a car. Particularly, more quotes coming from younger buyers tells us a car is likely to have strong demand in the future.

Hagerty receives roughly a million insurance quotes a year—more in a single month than there are public auction sales in a year. Our quote database consists of millions of records going back more than 15 years and is used to track value and demographic changes overtime for any classic car imaginable.

Policy Data—Endorsements

While insurance quotes are an indicator of who is shopping for a car, policy additions show who is actually buying. Hagerty provides insurance for millions of vehicles and our valuation analysts look at shifting demographic information and average insured values as an indicator of a car’s heat in the market. Increased numbers of particular vehicles added to policies, especially among younger owners, shows increased demand for that car. Additionally, we look at cars moving in and out of policies and when their values change. These actions are referred internally as “policy endorsements”, and in 2023 we witnessed hundreds of thousands of such movements.

Private Transactions

As most cars sell in a hand-shake deal between private parties, the sale price is normally only known between the parties involved. When a Hagerty member calls to remove a car from a policy, we ask them if they sold the car and for how much. While not every member shares this information, many do, resulting in over 13,000 private sales transaction records per year.

Hagerty Valuation Tools*

Hagerty’s Automotive Intelligence team updates pricing every quarter on nearly 1900 generations of cars, trucks, and motorcycles. The condition values for nearly 50,000 individual vehicles, many going back to 2006, are published on the Hagerty Valuation Tools website. Watching how vehicle values move against one another, we can see individual segments heat up, while other cars in that segment lag behind. Often, we use this to spot undervalued cars in the market when selecting cars for the Bull Market list.

Also, we monitor traffic on the webpages associated with these vehicles. As researching the value of a vehicle is often a first step in the buying process, increased pageview traffic is the earliest indicator of increased demand for a particular vehicle. In 2023, we tracked nearly 5.5-million pageviews for individual vehicles on the Hagerty Valuation Tools website.

Maritime Shipping Data

Through an automated process that combs maritime shipping bills of lading, we capture the records of about 25,000 vehicles entering and 900,000 vehicles leaving the U.S. each year (for vehicles three years or older at time of shipping). Narrowing this down to “classics”, defined as 25 years or older, we see 16k imported and 35k exported each year.

Shipping data can provide a variety of insights into the value of specific vehicles. When a car is undervalued in the United States vs other countries, we often see an uptick in these vehicles being exported out of the U.S. When the U.S. market catches up to the rest of the world, exports of this vehicle suddenly drop off. Also, exports decrease the available supply in the U.S., nudging the supply-demand curve.

Import data is particularly useful for as an indicator of increased demand for a vehicle in the U.S. If that vehicle is required to wait 25 years before import, there is often a spike in imports right when it becomes legal. How much that vehicle is imported in the following years shows if it remains desirable among it’s collector base, especially if imports continue to accelerate. On the other hand, if imports increase rapidly for a Japanese, left-hand-drive version of a car where a domestic version was sold in the States, it’s a sign that the U.S.-version is becoming more valuable, making the often less desirable JDM version worth importing.

Despite the vast quantity of data at our disposal, it isn’t a crystal ball. Though it is relatively easy for us to note rising demand for a car, it doesn’t always result in prices increasing beyond the typical market shift. That said, our predictions have done pretty well. Check out our Bull Market Report Card to see our best (and worst) picks over the past seven years.

*Hagerty and Hagerty Valuation Tools are registered trademarks of The Hagerty Group, LLC.© 2024 The Hagerty Group, LLC. All rights reserved. The Hagerty Group, LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hagerty, Inc.