What started as a blog throwing up Craigslist listings you might text your buddies morphed into an auction Goliath featuring everything from low-mileage A80 Supras to million dollar hypercars including Ferrari LaFerraris and of course Bugattis. The site is Bring a Trailer, and it changed how enthusiasts gawk at, vet, and buy collectors cars.
On the latest episode of The Drivecast, Howard Swig, who is now the President of Bring a Trailer, sat down exclusively with The Drive for a candid discussion about how the company fundamentally operates, how it redefined the online auction industry, how it’s contending with a wave of new competition, and how it’s all about the comments section.
The growth stages have been real for Bring a Trailer. The outfit didn’t just change how enthusiasts and collectors buy cars, it created an entire industry. Competitors have come and gone, though, one has stuck around and become a challenger in the marketplace. But Bring a Trailer’s secret sauce isn’t just one thing. And if it were, it would probably be the comments section.
But like everything there’s controversies and questions. People suspect there’s money laundering going on with Bring a Trailer as the throughput, a listing made it onto the site with AI-derived photos, and that’s before addressing shill bidding, comment moderation, and crazy outlier auction prices that make you scratch your head. Today Swig broke it all down in a candid conversation with Editor-In-Chief Kyle Cheromcha and Director of Content and Product Joel Feder.
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Full Transcript
Kyle: Okay, let’s go. So Joel, you ever sold a car on Bring a Trailer?
Joel: You know what? I can actually say I have. There aren’t that many
Kyle: Wait! Really?
Joel: I know, I know, I know. Yep. I know. There aren’t that many times we do this and you’re like, “So Joel?” And I’m like, “Yes.” I did sell. I sold my E34 M5 on Bring a Trailer. It was terribly sad on my life story. Remember that whole I used to be cool? And I actually in a previous life wrote it up for work. I sold the car and that was never part of the plan, but as I was selling it, I realized I’m a long time caller or longtime lurker, never a caller. And I had never realized how it actually works when you sell a car and Bring a Trailer. And job first, Kyle, you know me. And so I was like, I should write this up and the whole behind the velvet rope thing. And so I wrote this whole story of here’s what it’s like to sell a car and Bring a Trailer.
Joel: It was an interesting and cool experience. It was definitely in the modern era with the auctions. It was in 2016 and that car has now been resold three times on Bring a Trailer and I always get flagged in the comments.
Kyle: It’s a frequent flyer. I love that. I love that.
Joel: Somebody eventually crashed it at the front end and that’s a forever unclean. I’m done. I won’t touch it again. So it’s dead to me.
Kyle: Well, it had a good run.
Joel: It had a good run. But that brings us to today’s guest, the man in charge of literally something that upended the entire sales car collector industry, Howard Swig, who’s the president of Bring a Trailer these days. Howard, welcome.
Howard: Thanks for having me guys. Joel, you said 2016. I mean, that was early, early days. So you were obviously an early adopter and in the mix early on. Those were prehistoric times as far as I’m concerned compared to what we’re doing now.
Joel: It was long before the Bugatti Veyron sales and LaFerrari sales era, I will admit, but I got fair value, fair money. There was good action on it and it went for frankly what the market value was. Full transparency for anyone that never read that story in a previous life. I did get a favor from Randy, the founder of Bring a Trailer through a friend via Sam Smith. I was under a time crunch and there was already a waiting queue of a couple weeks to sell a car on Bring a Trailer once you submit it. And I was moving across the country and I needed it gone now. And so I did have Sam Smith reach out to Randy, connect us, and I got special treatment in the form of connections got me on the site quick, but I didn’t get any discounts. I didn’t get any special treatment other than it just got on the site quick. And I disclosed that in my story so everyone does know. Anyway.
Howard: You know what that probably meant? Seeing as we were a skeleton staff, Randy said, “Howard, this guy Joel’s M5 needs to go today, so write it up and do it this afternoon.” And I probably did. Sorry to interrupt you.
Joel: That was 100% running into Memorial Day weekend. So sorry, Howard.
Kyle: It’s amazing how times change.
Joel: I want to start off running through the background of Bring a Trailer. It was founded back in 2007 and I remember these days. It was a simple blog that was basically sharing cool classified listings of Craigslist cars, like stuff you would text your friend and they actually needed to be possibly picked up on a trailer, the whole point of that. And now we’re a business that it was acquired by Hearst. You guys are doing billions of dollars of sales. You got lot Ferraris on there. What’s the biggest factor of how this whole thing evolved? How did we get here, right?
Howard: Yeah, for sure. As you pointed out, it started early days as a pretty simple WordPress blog and online newsletter that was kind of right in the middle of what I’d call the kind of golden era of eBay and Craigslist when there was a ton of real gems out there and guys like Randy wanted to share their passion with the world and was and is still addicted to hunting around the internet and finding these treasures buried on websites and under rocks. So starting in ’07, he was featuring cool cars around the web, primarily eBay, Craigslist, but elsewhere too. Those were also peak times for these marque specific forums. We could, I’m sure, list those off with a smile on our face. This kind of very enthusiast following started to build. Obviously the comment section has become the secret sauce of what makes it fun and the community component.
Howard: Sometime around ’08, ’09, we started doing what we called BAT exclusives. Turns out that people not only wanted to read about and discover cars for sale elsewhere online, but Bring a Trailer emerged as a place with this captive audience that people wanted to sell to other Bring a Trailer community members. So that spawned what was called BAT exclusives, which were effectively fixed price classified ads and kind of the prototype for what an auction listing would become. That went on for, man, six, seven, eight years. The basic format was similar to what you see today. We’d post a car on Monday morning, a ’65 Mustang Fastback asking $22.5 and there’d be 48 people in the first hour that said, “Okay, I’ll buy it.” And the seller’s kind of looking at us saying, “Okay, well good success. My car is in the market and desired, but what do I do now? So is it first come first serve? That was kind of a clunky structure. So building an auction platform where all of those 48 people that want to buy it could bid on it seemed like a logical evolution of the exclusive fixed price model. So we rolled out BAT Auctions July 2014 was the first week we seeded that with three cars that Bring a Trailer owned. And from there, one of these deals, it was an overnight success and only took about 12 years.
Kyle: That’s always how it goes,
Howard: Right?
Kyle: But along with the evolution of the actual business from blog to classifieds to auctions and now high end auctions, the audience, the clientele has evolved. How do you guys think about this shift from a more accessible, everyone come look at this cool car together and we all kind of daydream about buying it to there are people spending literally millions of dollars in one go on your platform and there’s a lot more people who can’t do that. So how do you think about serving both ends of those market or it’s kind of like that’s what eBay’s for, for people who want to spend less than $10,000 on a car these days?
Howard: I would say that we get that question. It’s kind of a classic, not accusation, but you guys have left your roots of the every man car and now are selling million dollar cars every week. I still get a kick out of these seven figure sales that we’re executing, which is great. The irony I would say is that we actually list more of the traditional BAT Datsun 510s, E30M3s, sub $30,000 cool sports cars, projects, race cars than we ever have given the sheer volume of stuff. The high end stuff obviously gets a lot of attention. And when you have these big headline cars and results, that can suck a lot of air out of the room. But honestly, I’m proud to say that I think, I hope that we’ve stuck true to our roots in terms of what we curate and the very genuine desire we have to keep a full slate of all the cars that we’re kind of talking about, that you’re talking about of old BAT. They’re still there, man. They’re still popping up every day and closing every day, but there’s just a lot more… The piece of real estate’s bigger these days. There’s a lot more cars parked on it, so you got to search a little harder maybe.
Kyle: So what does the team look like these days? Because you referenced earlier, Joel needs to get his car sold quickly. Randy’s just like, “Hey, write this listing up.” I assume it’s a lot more complicated than that now. So what does the team structure actually look like and how many people are working behind the scenes?
Howard: Yeah, I would say the magic that still makes it work is basically the original team and most of the early employees are all still around. We all like each other, we’re all friends. So that is very helpful when you get on in years and decades running a business to like and respect who you’re working with. The company now is just shy of 200 total employees. I would say gone is kind of the scrappy startup, one guy wearing 10 hats. That naturally has to evolve into professionalizing the business more and having department heads and leaders and honestly at our sheer volume of auctions and inbound and outbound customer buyer, seller, commenter questions, inquiries, just in the course of day-to-day business that requires you professionalize and have a customer service department, have a curation department, have a production department. The good news is that the folks that are in charge of all that, and I think all the way down to the employee that started last week, I hope is ingrained with that kind of original BAT culture of transparency and hustle and doing things the right way. With the comment section and more attention on high and low value listings, we are still held to account as much as ever, probably more than ever, given the audience has grown so much. So that is something that we wake up every day and know we got to do the right thing and hopefully provide a good experience along the way.
Joel: So I definitely want to talk about comments. That’s definitely a question I have, but before we get there, I want to stay on the topic of the growth and the evolution of that. And so I’m curious, how does the process of vetting listings work today and how has more importantly that changed as your profile as a brand and the position has grown as a company? Take me through that.
Howard: So that used to be me and Randy doing that ourselves and that’s what we call our curation process. Some folks out there think we have some algorithm or some AI agent that does that. That is still a human process. Me or one of seven other folks on the curation team look at every single submission that comes in every day, which these days is upwards of 300 per day. And it’s kind of green light, yellow light, red light, and we want to pick stuff that’s cool, that’s on brand. We don’t want to list a bunch of junk. You want to list stuff that has a reasonable chance of selling. So there’s about 40% of listings are no reserve, but we want to have some input on reserve setting where we feel that’s appropriate. Obviously you want to check title, you want to make sure the car isn’t in Abu Dhabi or something or somewhere that maybe would severely lessen the chance that someone would be interested in bidding on it. Obviously, if it’s something super special, it doesn’t matter where it is in the world. So the curation pipeline, yeah, that’s a 10-headed monster every day. That doesn’t stop. We’re open for business twenty four seven, 365. We’ve always called it kind of shoveling, right? You got to stay on top of that or else that balloon’s out of control and you have 2,000 cars sitting in new submissions and people clamoring to get through the front door, lining around the block and a couple people at the register, but that’s obviously critical and downstream of that. If you do the curation job properly, getting all the photos, getting the info we want, making sure the title checks out when that makes its way through the Bring a Trailer assembly line on route to going live as a live auction listing, it’s a complex process. I think back to 2016 when you listed your car, man, I opened those early listings and there’s minimal photos, almost no video back in those days. If you had a walk around or startup video, that was like five star Ritz-Carlton listing, right? Part of that is just that selling cars on the internet, even outside of Bring a Trailer has evolved substantially. And the table stakes for what a seller needs to provide in 2026 versus 2016 is quite different, obviously. And that’s for the benefit of the buyer and just having more complete and rich listings to make an informed decision about. But yeah, I still chuckle and you mentioned cars coming through multiple times. We’ve had cars that have now come through four or five times. Sounds like that M5 is one of them. And it’s always funny to link back to the January 2015 listing and open that and be like, oh man, we were surviving on crumbs back then, but that’s how it is.
Kyle: I think it’s interesting that you use the word curation a few times here, and that’s obviously what you’re doing. There’s so many places you can buy a car online and if you go and Bring a Trailer, it’s this huge variety of makes and models and years and ages and eras and vehicle types. But even just from the photos alone, there is a common thread. It all looks like it belongs on the site. I think to me, I guess it probably comes down to the condition, like you said, no junk. Most of them are in really nice condition. If they’re not, it’s the kind of patina, if you will, that still gives it an appeal. But curation, even sharp curation, is not the same as inspecting a car. And Bring a Trailer is not liable for what a seller says or doesn’t say, and it’s not like you have unlimited resources or time to fact check everything that they’re submitting. As you guys have grown, have you considered some sort of in-house inspection service or extras like financing, shipping, escrow help, titling help, delivery, stuff like that?
Howard: We definitely have. It’s a good question. The car business has always been kind of messy, right? So part of the problem that Bring a Trailer solves, I hope, is bringing some order and honesty to what has historically been kind of the wild west of selling cars online. We do offer Bring a Trailer verified checkout, which is a title and escrow service. We rolled that out three, four years ago. So we have that. In terms of a third party inspection, there are various services that provide that. We have landed on staying in-house with that, having a high threshold of photos, info, seller information. Obviously the comment section serves as a zone policing force. And there’s a lot of coaching behind the background, man. Every seller has a specialist, a human being assigned to them that’s monitoring their auction. We have a community management team that’s monitoring comments. Obviously those teams need to work together in cases where an auction goes off the rails or a seller is MIA and on day three our community management’s like, “Hey, this guy’s gone dark. We need to get on the phone, send him an email.” It doesn’t always work perfectly. Human beings are unpredictable characters. I think most people, especially these days coming to Bring a Trailer, kind of understand what it’s all about. They understand it’s an interactive process and you kind of get out what you put in. But still, yeah, there are cases where there’s an issue or a car isn’t as described. That’s kind of part of the game. I think we have a very effective and seasoned post-auction support department. You talk about today versus early days in the evolution. I used to deal with all the post-auction issues and in those days we had 25 auctions a week. So you had a lot fewer. I wouldn’t say the issues themselves, it’s a fairly small number, but when you have 1,300 auctions live a week, that requires a lot of attention. So no, 100% of cars don’t sail through with zero problems. You’d have to be pretty naive to think that, but given the reputation and processes that we have, it’s rare that we come across a case where it’s like, wow, we don’t have any idea how to navigate this or find a resolution for the buyer or the seller. I don’t know if that answers your question, Kyle. That kind of a long-winded diatribe that just went on, but feel free to poke holes in that.
Kyle: It’s all good. We’ll have some follow-up questions on just the difficulties of running a platform this large and with a spotlight on it for sure. But before we get there and the comments especially, one last question on the overall standard that you guys try to hold yourself to in accepting cars. Earlier this year, there was a 2018 Ford F-150 XLT that made it onto the platform, just a regular old pickup truck. We wrote a story about it because it’s pretty remarkable to see something like that pop up on a site like yours these days. I’m curious, can you just explain how that actually happened or if not in general, how a vehicle like that still ends up on your platform today?
Howard: Yeah. Well, for sure, I would say we’ve probably expanded our curation kind of acceptance standards. I would say broadly speaking, when someone shows up to Bring a Trailer who’s pumped to sell, who has great photos, who wants to sell their car or truck at no reserve, who has solid site history, we try to find ways to tell people yes, not no. So that would be one answer to your question. Totally get that some folks are saying like, “Wow, now you list a ton of ’04 GMC Sierras.” Well, actually turns out there’s a pretty big following for that gen of Sierras, ’80s, ’90s F-150s. That market is very strong. I’d like to think we’re ground zero for finding the best XLT four speed ’92 F-150 in existence. But then there’s a few corner cases like that F-150 you’re talking about where it’s like head scratcher, that seems like a boring used car. Why the heck did they accept that? I don’t know. I’ll pull up that listing in your guys’ story and see if there’s maybe it’s a seller that’s super awesome or he came back, we told him no two times and he wrote us a lovely message saying how much he loves the site. He just wants to put his car in front of our audience. There is that human component. I don’t know the details of that one, but I agree with you in today, some cars sneak through where you’re like, that probably wouldn’t have been on there six years ago, but it’s always a daily balance of quality and quantity. And again, looking for a reason to tell people yes instead of no.
Kyle: That’s how you run a business, right? You want to say yes more than you say no, or at least find that right balance. But let’s talk about the comments in general, because as you’ve said, that is the secret sauce in a lot of ways. It’s really turned car auctions into a spectator sport. Whereas before, if you want that experience, you actually got to go to an auction and sit there and watch people buy. But even then you can’t talk to everyone in the audience all at once and crowdsource your own opinions and wisdom and spot issues. It really is a spectator sport. You mentioned that you pair sellers with someone to help them navigate that process, which I think is very smart because it also is, as you said, you get out what you put in. As you have grown and now you’re selling cars on a level of say a Sotheby’s, do you ever find that the existence of the comments section is actually a deterrent to buyers wanting to sell and Bring a Trailer because they’re just worried about what it’s going to happen when it’s just thrown to open comments?
Howard: Yeah, there’s definitely subset of individuals who want privacy, want maximum discretion, and Bring a Trailer is a very public forum, right? So that’s great. If you have a car that you know is awesome, you know a lot about it, and/or you have people that can support you in answering questions. Some cars don’t require a whole lot of Q&A, like a brand new 911 Turbo, it’s almost a commodity. You can talk about the options, it’s a PTS color, here’s why it’s awesome, but it’s a pretty known thing. A car that’s 80 years old, that’s been smashed and restored three times and has a mix of original and new parts, that obviously is I think where we can shine. And as a buyer, you love to read a week of comments before placing a bid on something that’s old and has history. I always make the joke that there’s this irony, people want a car with great history, but no stories. Well, you can’t always have both of those. But getting back to your question, yeah, there’s probably folks that would rather sell their car in a forum where there is not a public ledger of people’s opinions and comments. But I think as time has marched on, people realize that if they prepare properly for… If you just throw your car up with junk photos and the car has issues and then you’re chasing all this stuff while the auction is live and you’re behind the eight ball, that’s probably not going to be a great experience for you and your result is probably going to reflect your lack of effort leading up to the auction. But I think most people understand and it takes work, right? Buying a car is super fun. Selling a car is hard work and can be a pain in the butt. So if you put in the work beforehand to present your car in a condition and with the proper supporting documentation and work that was done, then it’s a lovely experience and hopefully your result is going to reflect that. I don’t know if that answers your question, Kyle, but that’s kind of my thoughts on that.
Joel: It answered the original question, but I want to jump in a couple follows because I’m guessing in 2014, you didn’t expect a cottage industry of publications, including us by the way, writing stories about whether it’s insanely high auction results, drama in the comments, accusations over shield bidding or favoritism of alumni. When commenters start flagging problematic comments in the listings, what happens? Who looks into it? How do you guys decide what to do? And really, what’s your standard for removing comments? How are you guys dealing with this?
Howard: Well, commenters and the comment section can be amazing first responders to major issues. It’s not always this juicy controversy where people want to peel back the curtain and we’ve had a few of those, you guys have reported on a few. We still have a self-policing system where if someone says something crazy or inappropriate or profane, we can remove that. We have obvious things that wouldn’t be allowed, those can get booted. The community can flag comments as not constructive. That’s been in place since early days. Some people get upset when their comment gets flagged and disappears. Very often that’s because other community members didn’t like it and they clicked that button enough times that the comment went away. But yeah, comment moderation and what we call the broader umbrella of community management is tricky, man.You’re kind of an umpire calling balls and strikes and you try to be fair and you stick to your values and get it right most of the time, but especially in cases where there’s a buyer or seller or a previous owner or a commenter, everyone can hang their hat on some valid point of view and sometimes our decision to take action doesn’t leave everyone super stoked and that’s kind of the business we’re in. It doesn’t always feel great, but we kind of have to use our best judgment and make a call. And sometimes people have different opinions of how we could have handled something and I’m sure that they have a valid point of view on that.
Joel: So you mentioned the term first responders and I really like that actually because I can just really relate to this first experience. And so I think this is helpful for people because I’ve actually done this. The E34 M5 community is not a large one. They sold like 1,200 or 1,300 of these cars in the U.S. over the course of three years back in the ’90s. And so there is a rabid community of owners and enthusiasts and historians that troll Bring a Trailer and keep track of these things. There’s an actual registry of these things and they try to know when things get crashed and destroyed. And there’s one guy that literally showed up in the comments immediately and he ran my VIN and he ran the whole list of options and the build sheet and all that of the car. So there’s people. So I’m just relating that your first responder comment is accurate And to you, to your point, they can act as your first line of defense. But as the media, I have to ask, so they detect things and they flag things, right? So I’m curious how you guys, when you have these first line responders, of course the media’s watching, how do you guys detect and protect against shill bidding in the eras of Porsches Ferraris and Bugattis? And then on that line, on the opposite end of the spectrum, we now are in the era of AI and we all know that… I’m curious, how did the listing with that AI photos get through the safeguards that you guys happened here? We all wrote about it. I know you know what I’m talking about. It was earlier in the year. Commenters obviously see these things, right? They flag you when they think they’re shield bidding. Obviously by the time you guys flagged on the AI car, we were all over it. But how are you guys detecting and protecting against these kinds of things and how did that happen?
Howard: Yeah. Well, a lot to unpack there. You talked about fact checking comments that may or may not be accurate that have material impact to the auction, brought up shill bidding, and then you brought up that Cadillac Deville AI debacle. So there’s some connective tissue with all those. I mean, there’s always going to be people trying to game the system. So you talk about the shill bidding deal and I’m happy to address that. We have a number of tools in place from matching IP addresses to tools that determine if various accounts share information. And then we have what’s very effective, what I would call on a cop show, good old-fashioned police work. Our community management members and other folks on our team are looking at bid histories and trying to determine if there’s a pattern, if there’s nefarious things going on. So people should know that there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to try to keep this as fair of a marketplace as possible, but there’s always people out there. It’s a fringe group. It’s less than 1% of people that want to act in a malicious way or try to cheat or all that. And that goes on in any number of businesses and industries. That’s not new. We try to do our best every day to prevent against that and to suss out people who are not behaving in the appropriate way. And there are occasional cases where something gets through and you see cars get withdrawn or you see us step in and leave a comment and explain what happened when you’re selling 50,000 cars a year. At those levels, there’s going to be a few every year where there’s some controversy of the flavor you’re talking about. The AI Cadillac, honestly, man, and I popped in there. That was the first week of January. I was like, new year, we had a good ’25, ’26 is going to be great. And then just this boneheaded, crushing auction that’s the worst press ever. We look like morons. You know what? This is a human business for better or worse. People make mistakes. I know that’s not the most PR media ready answer I could probably give, but that’s kind of what it boiled down to. That was a real car, that was a real seller. It wasn’t some nefarious guy. I think he was playing around or his son was helping him out. I don’t know if you remember all the details. It got through our system. Multiple people looked at it. It got waved through. It went live. Obviously within a New York nanosecond, the BAT commenters and community were like, wait a minute. So in that case, we kind of shot ourselves in the foot there and we had to own it. And I hope that we did. I popped in there. That was like fire drill. I’d rather write your M5 on Memorial Day weekend 2016 than that was Sunday night, phone blowing up. This urgent DEFCON five. We need to take action now. So you know what? We live to fight another day and what else?
Joel: Last question on that topic, then we’re going to move on. So just in general, I am curious because that shit happens. How many suspect listings do you guys end up catching a year, coming through a year? Because like you said, someone’s always trying to gain the system and you guys are trying to go through it. What’s the volume here? How much work are you having to do to try and suss these things out?
Howard: You mean auctions that get withdrawn due to some issue? Actually, I wish we have those stats somewhere. I should have. If you would give me a heads-up, I could have come here with some hard data for you guys.
Joel: I just mean how many suspect listings do you guys end up catching a year and then you’re like… Because people are, like you said, trying to gain the system.
Kyle: Submissions even.
Joel: Yeah, submissions.
Kyle: People setting in cars where you’re like, that is a fake picture or this record doesn’t make any sense.
Howard: Yeah. What I wanted to say on that Deville listing, it’s not really a time to tell everyone how great we are, but the truth is that most of the suspect problematic, fraudulent… The internet has all sorts of crazy people selling cars that don’t exist or whatever. And we catch most of that stuff and you have to be a fool to try to sell a fraudulent car and Bring a Trailer. I can’t think of a worse place to try to pull something like that off. It’s just probably not going to work. But yeah, those come through. We have crazy listings that we share around and obviously it’s a massive red light, going back to my metaphor earlier. I don’t know if a lot, but probably tens, if not a hundred per year that are very suspicious that they don’t make it through the front door.
Kyle: So let’s talk about the successful auctions because something that Bring a Trailer is known for is setting records. There have been a number of times in which you guys have set the market auction record for a specific model, usually some sort of enthusiast model that previously was not worth that much money. Again, we’ve written stories, other places have written stories about Supras and NSXs selling for 200 grand on the platform. Why do you think you guys produce so many outliers? And do you think that is actually representative of the market value of these cars or that it is more of an outlier?
Howard: I think the market is always evolving. Right now, 2026 has seen this major re-rating of a lot of these late model sports cars. People talk about the late model Ferrari market. We can dive into that. But things like Ford GTs and SLS AMGs and Supras, a bunch of the stuff you mentioned. I love that Bring a Trailer often is kind of ground zero for these headline results and these market moves that are these resets and the new leg higher. And on the flip side, some stuff, I love Alpha Giuliettas. Well, they’re great cars to drive. Sadly, the market for them is pretty weak. That also plays out. Why do I think we’re a great place for that? I mean, part of it is just our sheer audience. Our registered bidder account is crazy. When you go to a tent auction, they serve a purpose and they do a great job, but you’re maybe getting a couple hundred, maybe 800 or a thousand registered bidders at a big tent auction. On BAT, it’s many, many multiples of that in the many hundreds of thousands. Obviously not all of those people can afford to buy a million dollar car, but when you get something really special, like you talk about NSX, we had a Zenardi edition NSX that sold a week or two ago for 650 grand, like 4X the previous result we’ve had for a Zenardi. Obviously that and NSX-R are kind of the halo NSXs and a car that is right over home plate for people of a certain age and right in the mix for something that’s hot, ’90s, 2000s. You just have some of this BAT auction magic. It’s the right car on the right platform that has a ton of people that are interested in it and a ton of people that are ready to put their hand in the air and buy it. And that leads to some of these heritage Ford GTs selling for two million bucks and we can go on down the line, but I still marvel at it and it makes me super happy and super proud that we have this platform that can unlock that sort of phenomenon, but it’s very real. But it starts with having the right car and we’re fortunate that we get a lot of the best cars and people recognize that Bring a Trailer is likely going to bring the highest result. And our fee structure obviously is the higher up the food chain you go. People think it’s crazy that we sell million dollar cars and make 7,000 bucks. I love it. We should do more creative marketing around we made 0.0001% on this sale. Auction houses would probably hate us for that. We’ve steered away from doing that. But anyways, the economics of selling expensive cars and Bring a Trailer is very, very favorable to both buyers and sellers. I think most people get that, but in some cases it’s wild how favorable they are when you compare it to alternative places to sell and what you’d pay in fees to do that.
Kyle: Yeah, it’s remarkable that the fee has only gone up from what, $5,000 to $7,500 and compared to a set percentage of some of these sales at a different place. It is kind of a steal, frankly. And it’s also kind of surprising to me that the economics of the business makes sense still given that you have scaled so much, there’s more demands, there’s more you need to do, but you are still making roughly… I mean it’s 50% more now, but unless there’s another rate hike on the horizon, you’re making the same fixed amount month over month, year over year on every sale. So yeah, it’s just the scale of the business has allowed you to grow because the margin’s kind of still the same.
Howard: Yeah, maybe we’re idiots, man. We’re not going to be winning any awards for maximizing revenue and profits. The unit economics are still favorable and when you keep growing, it works out well. But we raised the fee two, three years ago. We were biting our fingernails so nervous that we’ve never… It was $5,000 from day one and we said we haven’t raised prices in 10 years. Maybe we can bump it to 7,500. And it’s kind of like the old saying, if you raise prices and no one complains, you didn’t raise them high enough. I don’t even think people really cared that much. So maybe we should have bumped it higher. But yeah, we did that. No plans right now to raise it again. But yeah, to answer your question, given our volume increases, the entire business’s revenue is auction. We’ve always said anyone could go on the back of a napkin if you took the time, could probably figure out our revenues. It’s not a huge mystery, but yeah, maybe we ought to think about other things to do. But yeah, for now, the auction business is still the core of what we’re doing.
Kyle: Well, speaking of other things, is there a world in which we’ll see an in-person Bring a Trailer tent auction or is this online only and that’s the business?
Howard: Yeah, I don’t know if that’d be a step back or a step forward. In terms of… We invest heavily in events. We do alumni gatherings. We partner with races and other things where we can get people out live, the community in person, bring their car to meet each other. We feed them breakfast and lunch. Those are super fun and cool. I would say the closest thing to a live auction that we do is throwing these events and having cars that are live on the site at the event. So that’s kind of live auction-ish, but I don’t think there’s a world anytime soon where we’re erecting a tent and having an auctioneer. I don’t think that’s where we want to go, but who knows?
Joel: I’m curious, one of the most common reactions to outlier auctions, there was a $87,000 VW Golf GTI, which is serious change by the way, but there’s so many that we can look at that aren’t E30 M3s, which I will note you said this, like a sub $30,000 car in your dreams now. Totally not a sub $30,000 car now. Thanks. But a lot of people just say, “Oh, this is money laundering. It’s got to be money laundering. How can it not be money laundering?” What’s your reaction to that?
Howard: I think Bring a Trailer is one of these places where there’s this amazing voyeurism for people spending money. And when people see that, and elsewhere too, people have all sorts of opinions. Even getting down to the bid increment. Well, why would that guy bid a $4,000 increment when he could have bid a $1,000 increment? Well, you know what? How someone chooses to spend their cash or the way in which they do it, Bring a Trailer is an amazing public place where that plays out in real time and people can have all sorts of opinions on what they’re doing. If someone has a wine cellar with 10,000 expensive bottles but never drinks it, well, if they enjoy owning it, they can do whatever they want with their wine cellar. So if some people think it’s money laundering, well, that seems extreme. I don’t think that’s accurate, but people have all sorts of crazy opinions, man. I’m sure you guys see it in media and opinions to articles you write. I don’t know. But no, I don’t think it’s a case of that sort of activity.
Kyle: Also, I guess it really wouldn’t be your problem, right? If someone hypothetically were to use some sort of platform to do that, it’s like the crime is the money laundering itself. It’s not like you guys can’t really control where the money comes from that someone’s spending on your platform. But in any case –
Howard: If you’re a money launderer and you are spending 90,000 on a whatever Mark three Golf GTI, would love to meet you. I don’t know. That doesn’t seem like a wise way to do that. So I don’t know. There’s a lot of holes we can poke in that. But anyways, onto the next one.
Kyle: That is true. So we talked about cars being sold repeatedly on the platform, the same car, including Joel’s. If someone wasn’t aware of the fact that you only have a fixed fee on these cars, they might think, “Oh, well, they want to re-list this car because they want another even higher result and they make even more money.” But it’s the same money every time for you guys, and therefore it’s the same difference as any other car you would list that meets your standards. So what is the thought process behind re-listing a car multiple times? Are you responding to the interest that you saw previously? Is it about cultivating the community as well so people know that this is something that can be done? How does that work?
Howard: I mean, it’s self-selecting for the seller. If they want to use Bring a Trailer for it to be sold again, it’s not always the person that bought it on Bring a Trailer. I mentioned we’ve had cars that have gone through three, four, five times. I moved run through the other day. We sold it in 2017 and now it’s back eight years later and owner number three on from the BAT auction listing. We have no problem. We have the history module that shows every time it was listed previously, we linked to that. I think it’s really cool, this phenomena of a car’s transaction life cycle existing primarily on Bring a Trailer. It’s pretty cool. So if there wasn’t issues and the car, whether it sold or RNMed, we’re very happy to have cars come back around two, three, four times. I think it’s awesome.
Kyle: Offhand, do you know what the record is for the number of times that the same car is sold on the platform?
Howard: Definitely five. Wonder if there’s a six handle out there. Not more than six, definitely five though.
Kyle: Gotcha. So you mentioned we’ve been talking about market trends. What are you guys seeing right now in the way that you kind of saw the early signs of this wave of ’80s and ’90s cars becoming extremely collectible and a lot more valuable? That seems to have sort of plateaued a little bit. Where do you see the growth for the collector market looking ahead the next five, 10 years?
Howard: The invisible hand of the market is a crazy thing. I mean, a lot of this stuff has been steadily rising. And then talk about Ferraris, especially manual transmission 360s, F430s, F355s, and then the more limited production, 430 Scuderias, 360 Challenge, 16Ms, that stuff has gone parabolic. And at the super in, stuff like F40s and F50s and Enzos and La Ferraris, all the stuff your audience probably has been tracking is nuts. And honestly, if it plateaued, everyone that owns one would be very happy to have this permanently high plateau to steal a line from the 1920s. I think that probably continues. I think it’s always interesting to me to see what’s moving in the other direction. Series one Jag E-Types, an E-type coupe is getting pretty darn affordable relative to what they were in the past. There’s the stuff that’s going gangbusters, but then there’s the stuff that… There’s this opportunity, if you really wanted one, now might be your chance to buy a cool ’57 Sprint Alpha or an E-Type or name cars that might be going in the other direction that are still popular, still a healthy market for them, but for whatever reason, the price trend is down, not up. The other thing that’s been playing out, as you’ve seen, is selling new or nearly new cars, like some of these model year ’24, ’25, ’26 that become instant collectibles, which is honestly fairly predictable, and cars selling for over MSRP or double the sticker price that it sold for on the dealership nine months ago. That’s also an interesting dynamic that plays out everywhere, but on BAT very frequently.
Kyle: Listen, I didn’t hate it when I saw, as the owner of a K5 Blazer, I did not hate it when I saw the… I think it was a K20 Silverado in 2020 sell for 84 grand on Bring a Trailer. Again, possible outlier results, possible questions about whether that’s a sustainable pace for the market to grow at, but it is often the case where something will pop on Bring a Trailer first and then two or three years later that the rising tide has lifted and everything is a lot more valuable in that sector.
Joel: I want to address an elephant in the room because I have to ask, you guys, you created a whole segment, let’s just be honest. You completely upset the way auctions and cars and all that, whether it’s Sotheby’s or Mecum or any of this stuff, you guys redefined how some people might buy cars and auction cars, and you started a whole new business model and segment in the internet. There’s been competitors and followers, and one that’s rather large is Cars and Bids. And I’m curious as they’ve come along, have they hurt business? They do certain things differently than other things that overlap. I’m curious if they’re seen as a direct competitor or indirect. They have the inspection service and free listings, but they don’t have the volume you guys have. So I just don’t know where it plays.
Howard: Yeah. I mean, we got obviously a really nice head start, right? I mean, Netflix was 100% of streaming forever and now they’re 50% and you have the other folks. So you can’t expect to have the big moat forever and ever. I think that the best auction platform tends to get the best cars, and I think we’re still there. But yeah, for the first time, the last, I would say two years, for the first time ever, there’s other options and viable competitors that buyers and sellers can go to instead of us. So yeah, we track that. There’s good folks running those companies. They’re trying their damnedest to grow volume and quality and all the stuff that we already know. It’s not easy though. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. We used to have a running list of whatever, copycat auction sites, and most of them have shuttered, but it’s like over 100. You guys probably remember the first wave was kind of ’16, ’17, ’18. Man, now I’m going real back in my subconscious. And then a couple, RM tried their hand at online auctions for a couple years there.
Joel: Porsche tried their hand at online auctions for a minute.
Howard: Yeah. Marqued was the Porsche back thing. Maybe there was another one. There’s a ton, like I said, there was literally a hundred folks that have tried in some form or another to do online auctions. So Cars & Bids has emerged as probably the most viable site that is self-sustaining and they’ve got market share and they’re trying to grow. I’m sure they’re a competitor and they’ve done a good job and you look at the stuff they’re selling, we’d probably sell most of the cars that are appearing on their site. So we got to keep doing what we’re doing, listing great cars, giving people good experiences, and that daily action on Bring a Trailer. I lived for it 10 years ago. I still live for it today. That is something, the entertainment value, one hand washes the other, it all goes hand in hand. If you list a bunch of boring 2018 F-150s, people probably aren’t going to be too stoked about that, but as long as we keep the curation up and have this rabid community that still loves commenting, I think it puts us in a good place going forward.
Joel: So I do have to ask, bonus question, what’s in your garage and what have you bought on Bring a Trailer? Because this has got to be like the drug dealer’s deal, right?You’re selling all this cool stuff, you’re seeing all this cool stuff every single day, and it’s like there’s no way you could stay married and employed if you took a hit every day, right? You’d be broke. So what do you own and what have you bought off bat?
Howard: Yeah, I’m actually in selling mode, not buying mode. I actually just sold a car that went nuts. I knew it was going to go nuts. It was a 7’5 RA28 Toyota Celica, which was a Swiss market twin cam mid ’70s Celica, which I don’t know if you caught that orange car, but it was super cool. Let that one go. Had an ’82 911 SC Coupe that I’ve had for a long time, sold that. An old guy told me recently, he’s looking at his new car philosophy as newer and fewer, and I think I’m buying into that. So I’m selling, not buying. But yeah, like I said, we’re a big Alfa family. I’ve got some Giuliettas. I’ve got a Sprint Zegato, which is probably my favorite car in the collection, ’65 Mustang Fastback. So we still play with cars. I have a 996 GT3 Cup race car that I like running around at some vintage races. That’s super fun.
Kyle: You are a man of great willpower to exist in this world every day and to not be tempted into, as Joel said, bankrupting yourself. I think also the muscle memory to the point about the excitement of the daily action, having a decade and a half plus of muscle memory of people typing Bring a Trailer into their browsers when they’re bored at work or looking for something to do, that’s a pretty big advantage, I would say. So Howard Swig, president of Bring a Trailer, thank you so much for your time. This was a really great chat.
Howard: Yeah, a lot of fun. Thank you, Howard. You guys are awesome. Thanks again.
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