Barrett-Jackson Hammers Out $29 Million in Las Vegas

The three day inaugural Barrett-Jackson Las Vegas auction sold 533 cars for over 29 million dollars. The event was held at the Mandalay Bay Resort, Casino and Event Center on Las Vegas Blvd. Each day the bidding got underway at 11:30am and continued until 8:00am the next morning. That means on average, one car sold every 7.5 minutes for $54,000. How many new car dealerships are having that kind of success these days?

What we also find interesting is that during this “credit crisis”, fifty percent of Barrett-Jackson's registered bidders were first timers. That’s a compelling argument pointing to, despite a poor economy, the buying and selling of collector cars remains relatively strong.

An LA Times article on the Barrett-Jackson auction disagrees with our outlook by saying the numbers show market weakness in comparison to the company's 2005 sales in Scottsdale that brought an average, $92,324 per car. It’s true that this economy has righted the over-inflated collector car prices from previous years, but it has also affected the types of car that are being offered.

What Barrett-Jackson brought to Las Vegas that they didn’t bring to Scottsdale in 2005 was their “something for everybody” approach, and there weren’t any million dollar babies in the line-up. The top seller among the cars to cross the auction block was Carroll Shelby’s first road race car, a 1949 MG TC. Bidding for the MG reached six figures quickly after the opening offer and dropped the hammer at $313,500.

We’re not saying that this “No Reserve” auction didn’t offer some great bargain, because it did. A 1954 black Corvette convertible, with red interior and frame-off restoration, sold for $83,000 late in the last hours, of the last day of the event. A steal in our opinion.

You can find a full listing for the results of Barrett-Jackson’s Las Vegas auction on their website.