Are we seeing the Ferrari Daytona’s resurgence in the collector car market? A few sales point to the answer being a resounding, “Yes!” However, those sales may just be outliers – only time will tell. But we don’t expect it will take much time as anyone who owns a Daytona and wants off the ride is likely contacting their favorite auction company to consign their Ferrari while the market looks promising.
In Monaco last month we saw a 1973 Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona that was converted to competition specs sell for roughly $600,000 at RM Sotheby’s. Of course that’s not a standard Daytona, but there is a certain appeal to the Ferrari enthusiast for any competition spec car and it’s certainly a more affordable way to own one of them than to buy one of the 27 competition Daytonas that were built by the factory.
Gooding & Company sold another ’73 Ferrari Daytona for $797,000 in Monterey back in August of 2021. That was well above their original estimate of $550,000 – $650,000, but it’s more likely that the particular car in Monterey had two very committed bidders than for it to be a sign of prices to come. That’s what we would think at any rate, considering most of the other Daytonas we’ve seen cross auction blocks in the past few years have fallen pretty short of the high water mark from 5+ years ago.
But we’ve now seen another 1973 Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona sell for $692,000 on Bring a Trailer. The auction for this Daytona sold on May 27 and was offered for sale by Symbolic International, which appears to be a new username for a well-established seller on BaT. So we have to ask ourselves – is this really a sign that the Daytona market is climbing back up? Or, on the other hand did this particular Daytona perform so well due to the seller’s reputation?
Is It the Car or the Dealer?
Symbolic International is Bill Noon’s company and he’s sold more than 50 cars on Bring a Trailer going all the way back to 2012. Within the Bring a Trailer community, he has a well-deserved reputation as a trustworthy dealer who consistently brings quality cars to market. He even sold a 2004 Porsche Carrera GT that was once owned by Jerry Seinfeld for $1,865,000 on the same site. So there’s certainly no doubting his qualifications as a seller. Keeping that in mind, looking at his past sales doesn’t seem to show cars going for more than expected, albeit they usually sell near the upper end of the market value.
So... Is the Daytona Market Recovering?
So this brings us back to one question: What’s going on with the Ferrari Daytona market? In our opinion, while prices do seem to be higher than they were a few years ago, we don’t expect the Daytona to get back to the $800,000 prices some were fetching in 2016 – 2017. There’s just no reason for them to suddenly jump that much in price – nothing’s changed about them, and if our suspicion that collectors who bought a Daytona near that high point in the market are going to see this as a chance to offload their cars without taking too much of a hit to the wallet, whatever may be driving the prices higher may well be offset by more Daytonas hitting the market than usual.
We’ll keep an eye on Daytona prices in the months to come, but this likely isn’t the time to buy one and expect to make a substation profit off of it in the immediate future.