New Hagerty Tool Takes Pulse Of Collector Car Market

Dabble in the classic car market, or maybe just curious about its health and looking for better information? Owners and admirers can now turn to a new valuation tool created by the world's leading insurance provider for classic vehicles, Traverse City's Hagerty.

The new Hagerty Market Rating is a numerical rating that reports the status of the collector car market by applying a weighted algorithm to 15 data points in eight categories. The results analyze public auction and private sale activity, insured values, price guide values, the Hagerty Indexes and expert sentiment.The January 2015 rating is 70.22 on a scale of 0-100, which indicates an overall expanding and healthy market. The rating will be updated monthly.

"The key differentiator is that the Hagerty Market Rating isn't based simply on public data like auction sales, which only make up three percent of the annual transactions in the classic car world," says McKeel Hagerty, CEO of Hagerty. "A large component of this rating is based on private-owner-to-private-owner sales, which is the most elusive and difficult data to obtain. We developed this as a tool to allow anyone who is serious about treating collector cars as investments to immediately take the temperature of the classic car market and truly understand the factors that cause the classic car market to move up or down."