Each quarter, we share the most notable winners and losers from the Hagerty Price Guide, and we also take stock of the performance of several different market segments with our Hagerty indexes. These serve as highlights of valuation changes over the prior three months and help people hone in on whether the values of cars they’re interested in are trending up or down. But what about the big picture—just how many vehicle values are going up, down, or remaining stable?
Well, it’s a pretty enormous canvas to cover: There are 39,138 vehicles in the Hagerty Price Guide. (This includes variations of all kinds—for instance, the valuation of a ’63 Ford Galaxie 500 XL with a 406 V-8 is distinct from a ’63 Galaxie 500 XL with a 260 V-8, which is distinct from a Galaxie 500 two-door sedan with a 406 under its hood.) But it’s precisely because of these reams of data the Hagerty valuation team collects quarterly that we can present a characterization of what’s going on with valuations as a whole, too. Here’s a visual of all the valuation activity Hagerty tracks, dating way back to the beginning of the Hagerty Price Guide in 2007:
Let’s break down exactly what we’re looking at. Red delineates the percentage of vehicles in the price guide that decreased in value. Gray represents the percentage of vehicles with unchanged valuation, and blue shows the percentage of vehicles in the price guide that gained value. You can see the spike during the pandemic—in the January 2022 price guide update, more than 55% of vehicles in the price guide increased in value. Since then, however, the story has been quite different.
We’ve talked about a cooling market for a while now, and the retracing of values hasn’t been nearly as abrupt as the pandemic’s upward spike. Rather, since January 2023, the percentage of vehicles losing value has hovered between 8 and 25, as shown in red. Over that same period, at least 63% of vehicle values in the price guide remained steady, as shown by the section in gray. As a lagging indicator, these data are a poignant visualization of the flat collector car market we now find ourselves in. It’s worth adding, though, that just because the market is heading slightly down overall, certain vehicles are bucking that trend—nearly 25% of the vehicles in the price guide saw an increase last quarter.
The strong middle—that significant percentage of vehicles in each quarterly price guide update that have held their ground—suggests that despite headlines and certain big movers in either direction, the core of the collector car market remains steady.
Report by Eddy Eckart
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