Online auctions dominate most car conversations here in the United States, thanks largely to the startling and overtly public success of Bring a Trailer. But even though BaT regularly lists cars for sale in the UK, Netherlands, and Italy (just to name a few countries), the majority of vehicles emerge for auction out of America and Canada.

With such a widespread reputation for spectacular cars reaching incredible closing prices, of course businesspeople the world over realized an opportunity existed alongside BaT if they could figure out a way to offer the same services to the collector car industry. In the UK, a site called Collecting Cars enjoys premier status as the auction platform of choice—with recent lots including the entire Leonard Collection offered at no reserve, quite possibly the most original rally car on the planet, and a record-setting Singer Porsche that brought in last-hour bids totaling over £100,000 from the UK, US, Europe, and the Middle East (with an effective buyer's premium of only 0.77%).

In the past six months, Collecting Cars opened offices in Germany and Australia to support listings in mainland Europe and Down Under. And now, just last week, Collecting Cars closed an inaugural sale here in the US. The day after that first American auction listing hammered, I spoke with Colllecting Cars founder and CEO Edward Lovett about the site's development and expansion worldwide, as well as his plans to find success within the saturated online car auction marketplace here in North America.

Collecting Cars Founder Edward Lovett

Edward Lovett Collecting Cars
via Collecting Cars

Lovett grew up in an automotive atmosphere. His grandfather traded in early Porsches and Ferraris, founding a dealership back in 1966. His father, meanwhile, raced at Le Mans seven times during a career as works driver for Jaguar and drove BMW touring cars in the UK (and Tom Walkinshaw of Tom Walkinshaw Racing also fits into the picture in the role of godfather). The family business still employs over 950 workers selling brands ranging from Porsche, Ferrari, and BMW to Aston Martin, Jaguar Land Rover, and more.

“I’ve spent most of my working life working within that family business, so I’m very much a born-and-bred car dealer," Lovett told me. "I kind of left the family business about eight years ago and started just going in my own direction. I became a buyer and seller of classic cars and a broker of classic cars around the world. And like most people who do what I do, I spent a lot of time in cars and on a plane going to different car events and auctions around the world—Pebble Beach and Amelia Island, Monaco, London, Paris, et cetera, et cetera."

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Building A New Site For The UK With A Little Help From Chris Harris

Chris Harris Collecting Cars
via YouTube

For the past five years or so, Lovett watched the Bring a Trailer phenonemon growing—or better yet, heard it happening among his friends and colleagues.

"During 2016 and 2017, when I was coming out to Pebble Beach," he recalled, "You could see the market had hit the peak in 2015 and the market was changing. And this name of Bring a Trailer, I heard it being talked about occasionally in 2016, a lot in 2017, and then by 2018, you couldn’t turn a corner without hearing someone say 'Hey, did you see that car sell?' or 'Hey, did you see that car listed?' or 'Hey I just sold my car.'"

After returning from the festivities at Pebble Beach in 2018, Lovett made the decision to launch an auction site for the UK specializing in the classic cars he already knew and loved.

"We pulled a team together very quickly and within a matter of weeks, we’d approached a web developer to help us build the platform and we were off to the races," he remembered. "We knew we had to do it very quickly—there was no one else doing it in the UK properly."

Luckily, Lovett calls Chris Harris a good friend and asked him to climb aboard the project—Harris now stars in much of the content Collecting Cars puts out, focusing on various collections and the more exceptional cars that show up on the site.

"I’m fortunate enough that I've known Chris Harris, the Top Gear presenter, for 20-plus years," Lovett explained. "And Chris is someone who’s always bought and sold quirky cars, so I called Chris to say, 'Look I’m going to start this business and we’ve chosen the name Collecting Cars and I’d really like to start a podcast to promote what we’re doing, would you be interested in doing it?' And he, without a second thought, was like, 'Yea sure, let’s do it.'"

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Setting Expansion Goals In October 2020

Collecting Cars US Homepage
via Collecting Cars

From the way Lovett explains the success Collecting Cars found in the UK after launching just over two years ago, the market there matches the kind of frenzy that Bring a Trailer inspires here in the US, where sites like Cars and Bids, AutoHunter, Collectors Xchange, and others quickly joined the fray. But in business, bigger always sounds better, and Lovett's plans for expansion entered development by 2020—including adding a watch-collecting site to the portfolio called, somewhat expectedly, Watch Collecting (or watchcollecting.com).

"In a strategy meeting in October last year, as we were really getting to grips with things in the UK," he explained. "So we decided we wanted to launch in Australia within three months, in Europe within four months, and the US within 6 months. And we delivered on all those four goals we set ourselves—but as I said, not with any rush. Because at the same time, we’ve scaled up our marketing operation, our operations operation, and also our tech team."

Expansion requires a lot of work, Lovett told me, and expanding internationally presents new challenges for his growing team, which numbered six employees last summer before expanding to 42 currently based in London, Munich, Sydney, and Los Angeles. And he expects to double in size again over the next 12 months!

"The more markets we go into, the more languages we have to speak," Lovett said. "And when I say languages, that’s English, German, American, because we all use different words to talk about different things—so we’re having to make sure we remain agile and that we can adapt to all the different demands of all the different markets around the world. We’ve had a whole day in the offfice with our management team here in the UK, from marketing to operations to copywriting to technology, to make sure that we’re ready for the next period of our growth."

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Inspiring Trust Among Sellers And Bidders

The Leonard Collection
via Collecting Cars

As a relative newcomer in the Wild West of auto auctions, Collecting Cars and Lovett aim to inspire new levels of trust and confidence among both sellers and bidders. The challenges of customer service on both ends of the sales process helps explain the rapid hiring spree—a lesson Lovett learned, at least in part, from a conversation with one of the BaT guys back in 2018.

"At the time, they were starting to scale up the business," Lovett revealed. "They had 17 employees at the time, and they were saying they had to deal with the same-old nonsense that you had to deal with in a physical auction, whether the car’s been misdescribed, someone doesn’t want to pay, a problem with this, a problem with that—all these problems occur. We’ve scaled up our team very quickly to make sure we can deal with the rate of inquiries we’re dealing with and to make sure we never drop off the level of customer service we want to give our users."

But Collecting Cars doesn't do everything exactly the same as BaT—for better or worse.

"Where we differ from Bring a Trailer—and some people like this and some people don’t like this—is we don’t publicize our no-sales," Lovett said. "We don’t believe that we have the privilege to publicize someone’s car is unsold at X amount of dollars. We think it might harm their sale and in all honesty, we haven’t done our job in selling it. So we don’t promote those cars."

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Listing Some Serious Cars

Collecting Cars Subaru Impreza Rally Car
via Collecting Cars

And Collecting Cars does put out a lot of time, effort, and money doing the job of selling cars, as Lovett puts it, from PR blitzes to collection walkthroughs and creative driving videos courtesy of Chris Harris—all in the hopes of convincing everyone involved that this site, among all the rest, understands the loves of cars as well as the business behind that enthusiasm. And the recipe sure seems to be working.

"The Leonard Collection was just that," Lovett told me. "We did everything we could from a marketing perspective to give that collection global awareness. We had over 200,000 YouTube views on that video and in return for our commitment to him, he returned that compliment by offering the collection at no reserve. And we sold those cars all over the world: Taiwan, Australia, UK, Germany, Holland, Sweden, North America. We sold three of the lots to North America, including the tank."

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Celebrating Two Years And 100 Million Pounds

Collecting Cars Chris Harris Vid
via YouTube

After having set out the list of goals last October, Lovett and Collecting Cars marked some important milestones beyond opening offices in Munich, Sydney, and Los Angeles. Two days before the firm's second anniversary—an achievement in itself—total sales on the site reached the startling total of £100 million (and a tire-shredding Chris Harris vid followed shortly thereafter). Lovett admits part of that success stems from the rollicking enthusiasm that boiled up during the pandemic, however, and believes things could soon change.

"There’s a lot of heat in the market, globally," he posited. "I’d say the market’s hot in Australia, the market’s hot in Europe, the market’s super hot in the UK, and from what we hear in the US, the market, again, is very hot right now. The word I use is frothy. We’ve been there. I was there, in 2013, we were like, ‘This can’t last.’ And in 2014 we were like, ‘THIS CAN”T LAST," and then in 2015 'THIS REALLY CAN'T LAST!' And we started to see things breaking apart quite quickly in 2015..."

But can the rise of online auction sites help to cultivate exactly the kind of enthusiasm that could create a new normal in the collectible car world? Whether it can or it can't, Lovett has accumulated enough experience to accept the market's volatility—and Collecting Cars positioning itself globally might just help to flatten those curves (a term we've all grown accustomed to hearing during the pandemic).

"Whilst our market always fluctuates with a different amount of transactions going on, when times are good, it’s great. And when times are not so good, there’s still money to be made, but the rate of transactions really slows down."

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Goals For North America

Audi RS4 Avant
Collecting Cars

https://collectingcars.com/for-sale/2001-audi-b5-rs4-avant-3

Lovett called Collecting Cars' goals in North America "modest" multiple times throughout our conversation. In the modern world of globalized business, largely made possible by the internet, he reasons, collectors should be able to confidently to buy cars from overseas—no matter where they live.

"The US is just a strategic position in the world to have an office," he explained. "We’ve kind of got the four continents covered now but our ambition is to be a global platform. We want to make sure that an American bidding on a car in Sicily feels comfortable doing so on Collecting Cars, that they trust our brand, they trust our platform. In the same way that an English guy wanting to bid on a car in Ohio, or a South African wanting to bid on a car in New Zealand, or a Hong Kong guy wanting to buy a car in Germany, we want people to feel comfortable using our site to transact globally."

"I think technology is a core part of what we’re doing here. Yes, we’re an auction platform that sells cars (and now watches), but we realize there’s still a long journey to go to make sure we have the best product for our buyers and sellers to use—and also our team in the office," Lovett told me. "We’re not putting up big fancy auction tents and a bar and private launch parties and having to ship cars all over the country at great cost. We want to keep our overhead down so we can pass that saving along to our users, so investing in technology and process now is a real part of what we’re doing."

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First Sales And What Comes Next

Volkswagen Thing
via Collecting Cars

The first car to sell on Collecting Cars in North America came in the form of a Volkswagen Thing—which hammered at $8,500 with plenty of rusty patina to go along with the wild, boxy style that makes Things so fun. Next up, a Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradale cracked $252,500 (talk about a solid upswing).

"There’s a huge amount of savings of cash in the world over the last year," Lovett admitted. "I think we read a stat somewhere that there’s something like $5 trillion of saved up capital globally. Now, cash is king, and I don’t think we’re going to see people just liquidating their cars very quickly, but I can see the market changing. I think, back in 2015, if you overpaid for something, you need to realize the loss or you need to start driving it, going out to enjoy it."

Here in the US, where auction sites popped up seemingly every other week, he hopes Collecting Cars can provide something of a different value proposition for the enthusiast community who wants to go out and enjoy their cars. Case in point, an event last week in East Los Angeles:

"We’ve also intentionally not employed previous auctioneers to work with us," Lovett somewhat surprisingly revealed. "We want fresh minds, so Kevin Goldfein, who’s going to be running our operations in the US, he’s a friend of mine and an ex-restarateur, so the first event we did was the taco run in LA. It’s funny, one of my colleagues in the office here said, ‘It’s kind of weird, it didn’t have much to do with cars.’ But when I looked at it, it gave me a big smile because it’s not really just about cars—it’s about personality. Car content can become a bit draining if every group of people you go meet is always talking the same conversation, it can become a bit dull. But if you all jump in some cool cars and go eat some tacos together around East LA, it kind of brings a different community and a different vibe together."

Now that Collecting Cars can successfully offer North American auctions on the site alongside the European and Australian expansions, notching off those October goals, I asked Lovett what's next on his list.

"This is very much an America-centric interview, but I’m also still very much looking forward to the Collecting Cars Oktoberfest in Munich," he laughed, before adding solemnly that there definitely "Won’t be any driving involved in that, though."

Sources: collectingcars.com, bringatrailer.com, watchcollecting.com, carsandbids.com, autohunter.com, and youtube.com.

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