A look at Bring a Trailer, an auction site for classic cars that says it has 100K registered bidders, with $230M in sales in 2019, up 41% YoY
Bring a Trailer has 100,000 registered bidders and listed 11,000 cars in a banner 2019, while the traditional auction market shows signs of cooling. Tweets: @dealbook , @nytimesbusiness , and @nytimesbusiness Tweets: @dealbook : The ancient Austin Mini lacked doors, side windows or even a radio. The Mini was nonetheless listed online with Bring a Trailer, a fast-growing website that now counts two million monthly visitors and 100,000 registered bidders. https://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimesbusiness : Comments on Bring a Trailer often set off long discussions about a car's attributes and shortcomings. The community's informed dialogue helps persuade bidders to pursue vehicles they have never seen in person, much less test driven. https://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimesbusiness : Known informally as “BaT” and housed in a former brick warehouse in San Francisco, Bring a Trailer had a banner year in 2019, as traditional classic car auctions showed signs of cooling https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2019, Bring a Trailer — a 2007 blog turned marketplace — listed 11,000 cars and moved $230M in sales, up 41% year over year, even as traditional classic car auctions showed signs of cooling. The site's edge is its comment section: listings spark long discussions about a car's attributes and shortcomings, which functions as crowd-sourced due diligence for buyers.
The arc since then validates the shift: Bring a Trailer went on to facilitate $1.37B in 2022 sales and held its 100,000th auction, while Doug DeMuro's Cars & Bids raised $37M to chase the same enthusiast-auction format.
First-order effects
- Traditional auction houses lose their information advantage: a no-reserve-format online listing with active expert commentary gives sellers of enthusiast cars a credible alternative without transport or consignment overhead.
Second-order effects
- Capital follows the proof point — Cars & Bids raises $37M from The Chernin Group and UK dealer-auction platform Motorway raises a $190M Series C at a $1B+ valuation, both betting on online-first car auctions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the classic and collector car market consolidates around curated online marketplaces where community commentary substitutes for the auction house's brand, leaving physical auctions with the top tier of lots only.
The trend: Enthusiast car auctions are migrating from physical auction houses to community-curated online marketplaces, with venture capital now funding challengers to the format Bring a Trailer proved out.