Hagerty Acquisition of Broad Arrow Group
Hagerty, after having purchased roughly a 40% ownership in Broad Arrow Group earlier this year, is expected to close a deal to acquire the remaining 60% with an all-stock transaction worth $64.8 million. The deal is expected to close August 16, just prior to the first-ever auction to be held by Broad Arrow Group.
This deal values Broad Arrow Group – which includes Broad Arrow Auctions, Broad Arrow Capital, and Collectors Garage – at $108 million. That’s an impressive figure for a company that is holding their first-ever auction two days after the acquisition by Hagerty.
While we have no doubt that Broad Arrow has assembled a very formidable team of collector car experts that are able to address most any collector’s needs, that’s still a high valuation for a new company. In the interest of full disclosure, we should note that we know some of the team at Broad Arrow and are very pleased to see this success for them.
Of course this doesn’t mean that Broad Arrow is going anywhere – let’s get that clear. They’re still holding their first auction on August 18, the day after Motorlux – formerly McCall’s Motoworks Revival – and the cars they’ll be selling will be on display during Motorlux, helping to kick off the main portion of Monterey Car Week.
Broad Arrow has other auctions coming up this year, including the Jim Taylor Collection which will be offered in Gloversville, NY on October 14 – 15. The Taylor Collection will be offered at no reserve, with one exception – the 1955 Jaguar D-Type. Really, we wouldn’t expect to see a D-Type offered without reserve anyway, but there’s lot of other cars in the Taylor Collection that are just as impressive and those will be available with no reserve.
The Jim Taylor Collection will be followed by a sale in West Palm Beach in the latter half of November, with plenty more to be announced for the following year. So while this news is exciting, especially considering how much Hagerty is investing in the event-space of the collector car world, by no means does this signify that Broad Arrow will be going away – quite the opposite, in fact.
A particularly notable thing about this deal with Hagerty is that the last time we witnessed a company that wasn’t directly involved in the collector car world in some fashion buy into the market was when Sotheby’s bought into RM Auctions, forming what we now know as RM Sotheby’s. Although we don’t have specific numbers to go on, it’s estimated that the price Sotheby’s paid put the valuation of RM Auctions in the neighborhood of $120 million, and that was for an auction company with 20+ years of successful sales.
Obviously a large part of the reason that Hagerty is so confident with Broad Arrow is the team that have assembled at the new company. Decades upon decades of experience and expertise in the collector car market are on hand to establish Broad Arrow’s reputation and the most notable example of the payoff from that experience just might be the cars that will be on offer at their August 18 auction in Monterey. 19 of the cars that will be offered at that auction have estimates of $1,000,000 or more. We certainly expect Broad Arrow’s first auction to have a much higher average price than the first auctions of any of their competitors.