Manning

Now honestly, as much as I like my car I cannot image paying as much as some of the folks in Pano have their cars listed for. There is a guy in the classified ads this month asking $10,500 for his 87 924S and another guy asking $9800 for a 77 Martini edition 924.

Thoughts? Does this indicate there is hope for the value of our cars or are these folks dreamers?

pete944

$10,500 for a 924S?
I want some of what he's smokin'.

Manning

Yeah, no kidding.

Granted it is a one owner car with full service histroy, but it has 87K miles on it too.

Jonas Goldsmith

I dunno about that Martini edition? Thats a pretty rare car.... not much of a car... but a rare one....

Eric

Manning,

I was leafing through the Classifieds last night too, and had the same thoughts regarding the 924 pricing. These people are definately dreaming. I could have bought a "rough" but running 924 Martini last summer for $1,200. Unless the Martini in Pano is the one that won the Manhattan award a few years back, that guy is in lala land.

RSflared72e

924/944 series pricing is one of the wildest areas of car sales I've ever seen...

Many owners price their cars (especially 951s) according to how much they love them, or what they've got in the car, not what the market will bear. How many of these cars actually sell that high?

The other end of this crazy spectrum is the very suspect pricing guide series that Bruce Anderson publishes in Excellence magazine. In virtually every issue, he makes a comment (in the section at the end, with example sales) about how some 944 series car was sold for too much. Rarely do you see him say a 911 was oversold - usually he'll say "well, we would allow an additional 10% for the low mileage, so this buyer probably didn't pay too much..."

Lots of misinformation out there. The simple fact in valuing these cars is that a 924/944 series car is much less likely to be in truly excellent condition that a 911 series car. A completely dogged out 911 wouldn't be worth much, but you don't see these nearly as often as say a crappy 944 - the snooty types buy the 911s and can afford the maintenance.

So, the AVERAGE value of a 944 is going to be much lower that a 911 for this reason, plus 924/944 cars do indeed seem to have less intrinsic value, as they were entry level cars, after all...

My main point here would be that the infrequent truly excellent 924/944 will draw full market; but, most don't warrant the ridiculous prices owners ask. However, nor should so-called gurus like Anderson belittle the sale of a very nice 944 going for above the average value. Any item in this world is worth what someone is willing to pay for it...

YMMV Al

RobbyK

My Uncle sold a 86 944 turbo with 36K on it for $20,000 grand ,its all in the eye of the buyer if it is worth it.

Jonas Goldsmith

Robby is right.... in the market of high performance cars, its not necessarily how much the car is worth on the market, but how badly someone wants the car? Maybe thats just me....

Robert D

Very true.

P944forScott

Dunno, my take is that PCA members are more or less Porsche nuts (like me) so they value any Porsche more that your average Joe. I think we tend to forget there are a large percentage of Porsche owners that are not PCA/POC members, they don't know about Rennlist or subscribe to Excellence etc. therefor if they are tired of their Porsche or want a new car or they feel it's getting too expensive to maintain they dump the car for cheap.

Ag951

When I was looking earlier this year, I noticed the PCA and rennlist ads tended to have higher prices than generic car sites.

Manning

I guess that is what I find kind of funny. You would think anybody reading Pano would have at least a slight clue about the cars in there. Therefore a Pano reader or Rennlister might be more likely to know what goes wrong with these car and be less likely to pay top dollar asking price. On the other hand a regular sap looking for a Porsche in the newspaper classifieds might be clueless enough to pay top dollar since they don't know any better.

I know if I had been more clued in to these cars when I bought mine I would surely have tried to haggle more and pay several hundred less than I did.

Dave951M

The flip side of the coin is that the average Joe thinks "I've got a Porsche, therefore it has to sell for alot!" I saw an 84na this week that the owner wanted $6500, but would take $6000 cash. No way in hockey sticks this car was worth more than $2k, and then a good track candidate. I pointed out the isle of reality in the sea of delusion but he refused to swim, stating he would store the car before taking $2k. Forgot to mention that the car hadn't had a timing belt, waterpump, nor rollers in the 5+ years this mental has had the car.