How to Establish the Value When Appraising a Classic Car

How to Establish the Value When Appraising a Classic Car
What does a report look like? Well this particular one has lots of information about the car that’s in here, there’s lots of photographs of the car, you know what’s in here, how do I come up with this? Well I look at comparables, I go online I find as many comparable sales as I can of alike vehicles, make the adjustments for those, write the whole report up on the computer, have all the information stored in there. This particular one right here, in fact this what you’re looking at is this particular appraisal that I’ve been, appraisal that I’ve been carrying around so I have information on the various I talked about the condition of the body, there we have comments on that paint, chrome, bumpers, sometimes these various sections are very long of descriptive, sometimes they’re short. The funny thing about car appraisals is the nicer the car usually the shorter the appraisal cause you don’t have a lot to say other than the body is an excellent condition or the interior is in excellent condition and you describe the various aspects but you’re not talking about past damaged or repairs that are needed or anything like that. So you have the various aspects of the vehicle, here I have comparables on this particular car this appraisal that I have in front of me, this was a 1941 Lincoln Continental so I was using Lincoln Continentals from 1940 on up to 1948 because the bodies were very, very similar on those cars, the grills changed over the years but from the grill back from the hood back was pretty much the same car and my feeling is on a car like that if somebody is interested in buying a 47 Lincoln they’d also consider a 48 or a 41 or whatever so this particular car I have the comparables that I found. I described various cars what they’re like, what they’ve sold for and then I always talk about market guides, there’s various books, periodicals, NADA bluebook that sort of thing that you can go out and pickup and they’ll give you an idea of what some cars are worth, what they think they’re worth. The funny thing about all those market guides is no two of them have the same opinion and some of them are even regional, there are some that may be more reflective of cars in the pacific northwest or the southwest or the northeast, so I take a look at all of those and get an idea of what the various market guides think that a car like the subject is worth, then I just kind of look at all of this, think about what I’ve seen what the car is like, the condition of it and all this just stills down to what I think the car is worth.