BRING A TRAILER PROFESSIONALFor $349, BaT will send a professional photographer to capture your car’s best angles. Here is BaT’s math: Sellers pay a flat $99 fee for an approved listing, which includes guidelines on required photos and vehicle history, the written listing itself (which the owner gets to approve), and live comment tracking for the auction’s duration. And if you do bid on such a rare-air moment, the funds all go to charity. traffic was a deliciously low-slung, noisy, fume-filled joyride. The Petersen gave me the chance to experience what the winning bidder spent $7,500 on: I slipped into the Jag’s left-side passenger seat early one recent morning and was amazed at how visceral every detail was. It recently auctioned off the chance to get a ride in Steve McQueen’s 1956 Jaguar XKSS - one of the crown jewels of the museum’s collection. BaT has begun to work with nonprofits like L.A.’s Petersen Automotive Museum to sell experiences. If your garage isn’t pining for a ’tii or a late ’60s Shelby Mustang, you can still get in on the addictive action. (If you really want to, you can click all the way back to Nonnenberg’s first post in 2007 about an Austin-Healey he found on Craigslist.) BaT is fully transparent about all costs associated with selling and buying - an important component of the trust it has garnered from some of the industry’s most knowledgeable automotive experts. You can see, for free, the prices the vehicle you want has commanded in past sales on BaT. Moreover, unlike its competitors, BaT is a living repository for all information it’s ever posted about a car. The specialist tracks the sale once it’s live, jumping in to answer questions and comments over the auction’s seven days. Once a car passes muster, the seller is assigned a specialist/writer who captures all available information about a vehicle. It is exceedingly careful about the cars it accepts Swig gives the nod to only 40-50% of vehicles submitted. Another ingredient is the level of service the company provides to each seller. Part of BaT’s secret sauce is the quirky daily model mix, which loyalists consume as if it were breaking news. In a few short years, the startup has successfully disrupted a crowded space with a solution no one had thought they needed - and that others want to copy. They also tend to be more expensive - for buyer and seller.īring a Trailer quietly stepped into the online auction space in 2014 with three auctions a week (it now offers 275). Live auctions pose their own limitations: They allow buyers to get up close to the cars, but the sales events happen only a few times a year, so it’s hit or miss, depending on what you’re looking for. The collective online offerings from these sources are vast but leave the average buyer needing to go elsewhere to research. Up until now, if you wanted to buy a Chevy Corvair, say, or a Datsun 240Z or a mint-condition, air-cooled Porsche 911, you’d go to eBay Motors, Craigslist, Hemmings, dealer sites or one of the live auction houses - from Russo and Steele and Barrett-Jackson to higher-end concerns like RM Sotheby’s. Every day it’s a choice between quality and quantity.” “We also want to list cars (and trucks and motorcycles) across a spectrum of condition and price. “We look at each submission from a buyer’s perspective: What important model-specific details would a prospective bidder need to see about a specific vehicle to make an educated decision to buy?” says Swig. Cars with clean histories, fanboy followings and delectable stories rise to the top. The mix is often actually weird, and usually weirdly successful. The daily lineup, hand-honed by Howard Swig, head of auctions, and his team, never fails to find the delicate balance between variety, rarity and nostalgia. The company’s winning formula is auctioning collectible cars online in real time, 50-plus a day, five days a week. Recently, I visited Nonnenberg, a bona fide car nut (as well as an engineer and entrepreneur), and his team of 18 in their open-plan, sheet metal-filled offices in San Francisco. “I’d even cut some of them out and pin them to my wall.” “When I was little, I used to love to read the classified ads in Autoweek,” says Randy Nonnenberg, the Bring a Trailer cofounder and chief executive, his bright blue eyes flashing at the memory.
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