The Hagerty Market Rating’s Pandemic Era Growth Has Been Wiped Away

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.

Despite over $390M worth of cars selling at the Monterey auctions last month, the Hagerty Market Rating dropped 1.47 points. This is the second largest single-month drop since March 2020, when all live auctions were canceled at the start of the pandemic. The current Market Rating value of 61.91 is also at its lowest since April 2021 which, if you look at the chart below, was the start of a 15-month win streak for the rating. All of the rating’s pandemic-era growth has been wiped away.

The Hagerty Market Index, an open-ended stock-market-style version of the Market Rating, also dropped 0.42 points to its lowest value in 30 months. The Hagerty Market Index has been dropping non-stop since its peak in late 2022, experiencing a 12-percent drop in that time.

While the median sale price at the Monterey auctions increased nearly 7 percent this year compared to 2023, the Market Rating's Median Sale Price at Auction metric dropped 1.62 points this month to 29.64. This is the first time ever that this metric has dropped below 30. Based on the Monterey auctions alone, and the 12-month window used in this metric's calculations, we would have expected it to see its first increase in a year and a half, but that was not the case.

This is partly because the volume of sales at the Monterey auctions are a drop in the bucket compared to the classic car market as a whole. A little over 800 cars were sold at the 2024 Monterey auctions, which is about 16 percent of the total sales in North America last month. By comparison, over 4100 cars were sold on Bring a Trailer in that time. The non-Monterey sales pulled the median sale price down to $28,350. While this would have been a record high prior to 2019, it's a 9.6-percent drop from the $31,350 median sale price this time last year.

Our industry experts have officially labeled this a "contracting market", giving the current market a lower score than at any time since 2010, citing turbulence in high-end cars. Specifically, a drop in sell-through-rate among seven-figure cars at auction grabbed the experts' attention, though it appears that poor performance for high-end vehicles was segmented. For example, while all seven-figure Ferraris sold at a lower rate than last year, Enzo-era cars (the crown jewel of high-end auctions) suffered more than post-1974 Ferraris. This suggests a shift is occurring.

As more and more Gen-X and millennial buyers enter the market, the top shelf cars from their youth are poised to supplant more traditional blue-chip classics as the most desirable cars at any auction. Just look at the rise in value of the Ferrari F50 in recent years. Ten years ago, a Ferrari F50 was worth half the average Ferrari 275 GTB ($1.3M vs. $2.67M), but that has now flipped. Since 2010, the average 275 GTB value has decreased 7 percent to $2,475,000, but the average value for an F50 has soared to $4,450,000—a 242-percent increase from 10 years ago.

A new Hagerty Price Guide update will be released at the start of next month. Then, we will be able to see how the softening market over the past few months is reflected in the real dollar figures for specific cars.