RUMCars Forum
General Category => Sales & Auctions => Topic started by: Bob Purton on January 26, 2008, 07:48:35 pm
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Nice little car but when you take a closer look there is a list as long as you arm of unoriginal parts and incorrect detailing. Wrong mirrors, wrong hubcaps, wrong rear side lights, lots of missing interior trim parts, steering bar colour wrong, inside nosecone colour wrong, odd rubber trim around dashboard to mention but a few. Nothing that couldnt be put right though. Call me picky but it is advertised as "original car" Surely that should mean original spec. It looks set to make a big price regardless! http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=130193211000&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT&ih=003
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original to me means unrestored.very few original cars about now.
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Still "nice" though, in a 1980s sort of way.... :)
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first thing i thought when i saw it was 2cv dolly!
i do actually like it,the only thing that i would have to change originality wise would be to paint the handlebars cream. :)
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well, it does say "restored" all over the place in the listing.
I think by "Original car" they mean "not a kit car or custom job"
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Well I did say "call me picky"! I did chat with the owner yesterday and he was under the impression that you couldn't get the parts i.e. wing mirrors, hub caps ect, I directed him to the Owners club and told him they were all available but I think he is just a dealer moving it on, perhaps we will see it under new ownership in the summer with all the correct bits on. These high prices for schmitts appear to be not just a blip but sustainable!
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i hope then that opinions within certain circles in the micro scene will change regarding poor people like me who like Reliants,Bond 875's,Fiat 126's and 2cvs etc.This is fast becoming a rich mans pursuit,and if the all go into collections and dealers,will dissapear from rallies of the future.
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Come on now Dan, you own a lot more vehicles than most on this forum, my guess is that your loaded!
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These high prices for schmitts appear to be not just a blip but sustainable!
A high reserve (not yet met unsuprisingly) is not the same thing as a high selling price and I'd always be very wary of reading anything positive into auction where the bidders' identities need to be protected. This is a nice car, it would be nice to know how much it would sell for on the open market but this particular auction is a fudge.
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Come on now Dan, you own a lot more vehicles than most on this forum, my guess is that your loaded!
Im unemployed,live with my mum,have no garage,and have never spent more than £1500 on almost anything.
Everything i have has been got through buing and selling from mopeds working my way up to what i have now,none of which is worth more than £2500.even if i sold everything i had i couldnt afford a complete schmitt.
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You know I'm pulling your leg Dan! How do you think I got mine ? I bought a wreck for a grand and spent the next five years rebuilding it as and when I had the money. About them all disappearing never to be seen again at shows, I dont think that is the case, there are more appearing at the rallys every year, not less ! For example at the bath rally last year there were more schmitts in attendance than any other microcar. Because the parts supply is so good now cars that couldnt be restored before are now being resurrected, the reason they are so expensive is because they cost a fortune to restore.
RUSTY CHROME> are you saying that the three last year sold on ebay for £15,000 £13,500, and £11,000 respectively didnt sell? I was under the impression that they did , do you know otherwise for sure? I know what you mean about auction manipulation though, I have been an antiques dealer for the past thirty years and have spent half of that time hanging around auction rooms so I know all the tricks. My only problem with higher values is that the insurance will go up.
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RUSTY CHROME> are you saying that the three last year sold on ebay for £15,000 £13,500, and £11,000 respectively didnt sell? I was under the impression that they did , do you know otherwise for sure? I know what you mean about auction manipulation though, I have been an antiques dealer for the past thirty years and have spent half of that time hanging around auction rooms so I know all the tricks. My only problem with higher values is that the insurance will go up.
I've absolutely no idea if those other scmitts sold, only that an auction on ebay is a very public advertisement and therefore not always a straightforward exchange of goods for cash. As with almost anything collectable, values are often subject to artificial manipulation for a wide variety of reasons. Ebay auctions where the user ID are kept private are particularly dubious and often little more than straightforward price-fixing between friends without any real intention of making a sale. In many ways Ebay's greatest strength - that it is relatively easy to find rare and unusual items - is also its greatest weakness.
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[A high reserve (not yet met unsuprisingly) is not the same thing as a high selling price and I'd always be very wary of reading anything positive into auction where the bidders' identities need to be protected. This is a nice car, it would be nice to know how much it would sell for on the open market but this particular auction is a fudge.
As soon as an item goes over £100 then it becomes a quasi private auction. The difference being in that the winner (over reserve) is posted. I suspect this was brought about by Ebay so you as a 3rd party who happens to have teh same thing as listed can offer it to the 2nd bidder.
Thus Evilbay loses its listing fees etc...
Vee villl have full control by any means! Must confess lots of rare bits that may have been slung in a skip do crop up. But I personally think Ebay is a nightmare.
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Well, the red and white schmitt is up to £10,000 and the reserve is met, the virtual auctioneer may have been taking bids off the chandelier but it looks like another sale! One thing about ebay auctions is that the potential buyers cant ring it! Ringing it means to conspire with each other to restrict the bidding so that the lot does not reach its true value, the conspirators attend the knock out in a shady back room of a pub after the sale where it is in effect auction again amounst them, one person gets the item and the others in the ring get an equal share of the difference between the first auction price and the second higher knock out price. Its not as good as it sound though because you get a room full of leeches who have no intension of buying anything but are in it for a share of the loot at the knock out. All highly illegal but goes on every day undetected by the fraud squad and the auction rooms. Do I get involved? No fear, it would be more than my "Jobsworth"!! In ebay auctions the advantage is to the unscrupulous sell who gets all his mates to run the price up to the reserve and hopes that a genuine bidder comes in right at the end with the winning bid.
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Well it achieved £13650. Prob needs a few quid spending on it to get it 'correct'.
Sign of the times...
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I'm sure it did really sell but I was thinking that a seller could still arrange bogus bids even behond the reserve and if it stopped on one of there 'arranged' bids they could wait a fortnight, declare it an unpaid item and get away with just paying the insersion fee! The more one thinks about it the more one realizes how open to abuse ebay really is!
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Looking at the questions posed there was much interest. This was (will be) a kosher bonefide sale.
Supply and demand drives prices north. If you want a decent morris minor then you wait 3days. Want a schmitt? You'd be lucky in 3 months. Might be a year..
Ebay is to blame for all this. So taking the above into account you'd be mad to sell a decent car as how will you get another? Too much of a risk..
This all perpetuates the cycle. Apply this logic to a P50 of which 18 real ones are left and you do, to use modern US parlance, 'The Math'.
Ho hum..
One last thought, fossil fuel's never going to be cheap. Our contraptions whilst having filthy emmisions pro rata per CC are very good to the gallon. Perhaps in a decade or two's time these frugal toys will be de-riguer even more due to tiny engines. Food for thought...
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I thought the posted questions were very suspect. e.g. " Ive got a TG500 four wheeler, very rare blar blar, make sure you dont let it go for less than £15K" who would write in such a 'question'? I can see why a dodgy vendor would. Maybe I'm get too cynical.
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I thought that. But plenty of other questions appeared honest.
Lets keep eyes peeled for pos feedback. Early,Mid teens for a Schmitt appears to be the norm. Bummer if you aint got one. If you're selling good news. If you're keeping utterly immaterial... I'll be buried in mine.
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The car is worth whatever someone wants to pay for it, but unless you happen to be the vendor (or the purchaser) there is no way to tell if this car sold. All you can say for certain is that it was listed on ebay and the bidding went to £13650. Anyone who owns a similar car can point to the auction to show that their car is worth at least that and anyone who wants to buy one will think they've got a bargain if they can find one for less than £10000. Because user id is protected, you can't even tell if there were more than two bidders involved. Ebay isn't to blame, it's still a very useful tool for finding lots of obscure stuff. As long as money is plentiful, storage space is available and cheap reproductions of popular microcars aren't available , prices will go up. If only the Tata Nano had been a Messerschmitt lookalike!
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You make an interesting point about how thankfully there are not plentiful replicas on ebay to muddy the waters. This really would screw up the market, I know because this is exactly whats happen to the field that is my depressed livelihood. For decades I happily dealt in antique scientific instruments, you know , sextants, microscopes, telescopes ect ect. All my fellows smugly concluded that our market was safe from all the repros that were ruining all the other areas of the antiques market because these instruments were complicated and would be far to expensive for anyone to fake wholesale, there would be no money in it. One day about fifteen years ago a crate turned up at Portobello road full of repro sextants, I use the word repro loosely because they were not a faithful copy of anything real, some old boy in Bombay have made them from imagination, This was the opening of the floodgates, they now make astrolabes, equinoctial dials, reflecting circles, you name it! Now if you look up antique sextant on ebay I assure you that 99% of them are school of Bombay and many being offed as genuine antiques by either liars or people that just don't know the real thing from the scrap. The result is a well and truly stuffed up market where the punters are so confused about it all they have just stopped buying the stuff. Sorry to rant so about things not microcar but can you see what happens when replicas fall into the criminal hands of the masses, lets hope the peel situation stays under control!
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My sentiments exactly, I keep banging on about replicas but I
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A copy Monet is worth pennies to a true collector.
When there is not enough to go round of an item prices shift. If proper monied overseas types become aware generally and get wind of the really rare stuff then indeed say bye bye to seeing it as the NMR show. It will ALL gardually go abroad like fine art. Then probably come back in time.. England's a very rich island.
To build a rep of a micro would cost in most cases (not Peel) more than the real thing. If something's cheap to copy and have huge intrinsic value then skulduggery will always ensue. No rhyme or reason to desireability however.. Schmitts are worth more than Tro's or Zettas because (i think) they look better. Just like an S1 E-type's worth more than a S3V12 2+2.
After all the hulabaloo about the just listed TG it raised shy of £20k. Which proves that whilst they're rare most puntas want a complete sorted example.
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I'm not opposed to all replicas though. For example I will never be able to afford a TG500 but I could build one up from parts and power it with say a Trabant motor, everything under the lid would be of my own design. This car would never be passed off as a right one and I would enjoy building it and enjoy driving it, I cant see any harm and neither can most, after all the Heather brothers were given a trophy for doing it at the last NMR. The greatest pleasure it would give me though would be that it would really wind up all the TG500 owners! Peels are a different story though, you could build a replica and if you could source the correct engine, leave to patinate for a few years and hey presto, one genuine peel!
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You'd be doing well to trick any Peel cognocenti with a rep. Devil's in the detail... Even the engine number's are unique to the Peel cars. Mind, a fool and his money are easily parted!