If I:
Bought a kit for $50,000.00.
Spent, lets say....300 hours building it to a very respectable level.
~Then I put 500....2500....5000.... miles on the odometer, how do you determine what the cars value is?
~How do you determine the market value for a vehicle that is in such limited numbers (like the SL-C)?
~How do you determine what the depreciation is, or should be?
Good question and on topic... I don't know, and I don't think anyone else does either, despite their claims to the contrary. Some of us with recent purchase experience took a stab at it by tracking sales in a GT40 thread a while ago, where it is perhaps reasonable since there are hundreds of them. But I think mostly we arrived a ceilings for values, not values.
If I had that problem I would try to pack the statistics by looking at more common analogous kit cars (Cobras, for example) and collect as much sales data as I could. Then with knowledge of build costs, normalize them all and make scatter diagram of parts cost vs sale price, mileage vs. sales price, etc. Maybe, just maybe, you would see some meaningful clusters or lines. My intuition is that "depreciation" per se does not factor in much. As long as it isn't really old and has low (< 10K) miles, I suspect those issues have no effect. And I'm pretty sure your labor hours have no effect. So I think the fundamental question is, "what fraction of parts cost will I get?" and you should probably assume it's lower than 75% or else you're in for either a big disappointment or a long wait. But at least you might arrive at a price that no one, with any justification, will laugh at and that serious buyers will consider.
But any even superficial understanding of economics would suggest one
simply can't with significant reliability given the small population, market size and large product variation of SLCs. I think this was the point Will Campbell and a few others have made up above. This renders concepts like "base value" useless because individual sales are strongly situational with respect to buyer, product and seller; the sample space is effectively "one" and we are no longer in a "statistical" context.
Another thing to remember, and this
does apply to the "topic" car, is that simply because somebody places an object on the market at an apparently inflated
price does not mean they think it has that
value. They may have some other motive, for example, just hoping to catch the odd marginal buyer who is
not trying to buy "at market" (impulse buy, or super-rich and doesn't give a damn). So referring to that seller (or any other) as "delusional" is at best a silly exercise in long-distance mind reading. Instead, it might be simply brilliant salesmanship because in the odd case where the sale takes place that seller is far more economically successful than various posters on this forum encumbered by the idea of applying pseudo-economics to micro-markets. Not every seller is under any time pressure to sell, and it's important not to project that onto them.
Using my recent real-estate buying and selling experience I can confidently assert that in both my markets there were several examples that were just sitting at an "above market" price simply because it cost nothing to do so and there is a non-zero probability that someone will come along who just has to have
that house. And when one of those sales succeeds, that seller is certainly not "deluded". But now he
is wealthy. So be careful whom you laugh at.
