I still remember the moment I bonded with one of my new coworkers in 2014. His name was Justin and our offices were right next to each other. Given that and the small size of our company, it was inevitable we would get to know each other pretty well, but a shared passion for cars expedited that process.
I don’t remember the initial comment that “opened the door” (I usually don’t with fellow car enthusiasts!), but I know we talked a lot about BMWs and other German sports cars that were already, or would soon become, modern classics. You should have visions of E39s and E46s dancing through your heads right now!
In the course of that first car conversation, Justin asked me if I had heard of this simple website called bringatrailer.com. I hadn’t yet, and little did I know how prevalent it would become in my daily life, but I was deeply intrigued. At the time, the nascent online auction site was facilitating the sale of a very modest amount of cars. I don’t know if it was less than 10 or a couple dozen a week, but it was few enough that you could go to the site multiple times in a week and not see any new content. Obviously, it was a diamond in the rough at the time, as it has since grown to be one of, if not the most, prominent online car auction sites in North America, hosting hundreds of auctions a week.
The thing that made Bring A Trailer so great was its niche of auctioning really cool and sometimes quirky cars. Prior to finding the site, I would spend hours upon hours pondering all the cars I wanted to buy, new and old, and constantly looking at cars.com and similar sites to find the ones I wanted most that were closest to me, the best bang for the buck, or simply “pie in the sky” dreams. In hindsight, that was hard to do because you had to sift through a lot of cars, many of which you didn’t care about and all of which had limited information. Not enough pictures, inconsistent availability and quality of vehicle histories, and no true sense of the price (at the time, dealer pricing models were not quite as transparent as they are today, and negotiation was the norm).
Even in its early, simpler form, Bring A Trailer addressed those and other issues. I was usually curious or modestly interested in most cars they auctioned, it was easy to focus on cars I liked the most, the listings were robust and thorough with lots of pics, and there was detailed information from the sellers, a well-informed and discerning audience who helped flesh out critical information for potential buyers, and full price transparency from the live bidding and past sales information. Suffice to say, I quickly got hooked! Even though my financial and practical ability to buy more cars didn’t change, I found a place that began having many opportunities for me to indulge all my automotive desires and make them seem more attainable. Not to mention exciting when it comes in the form of a competitive, live auction.
Flash forward to the year 2020, when everything changed for a couple years that felt like an eternity at the time and now a blip on the radar in memory . . . COVID. It was several years since I first started visiting Bring A Trailer, so there were many more auctions going at any given time, I would get daily emails with new and closing auctions, and I followed A LOT of them. While my deepest passion tends to be with German sports cars (Porsche, BMW M, and Audi S/RS), I like and aspire to own (or at least drive) a broad variety—foreign and domestic, exotic and muscle, hot hatches and wagons, sports cars and rugged SUVs, and so on. This obsession fueled my automotive hopes and dreams, and it helped me quickly gain a great deal of market knowledge, and both of those qualities came together in October 2020.
It was a 2003 BMW E39 M5, a beast of a luxury sedan that I lusted after in my 20’s, felt too young for in my 30’s, and became just right as an emerging modern classic as I was about to hit 40. There had been many of them on Bring A Trailer before, usually several auctioned a month, but this one also happened to be in my “backyard” in Maryland. I had been watching the auction for several days, and, although it was common for bidding to be slow until the final day or even hours, I was shocked that this 51K mile beauty was “idling” in the $20K range on the final day. It was a crisp and beautiful autumn day, and I was in my actual backyard when I had the first impulse that there could be enough value in the car at a certain price that I would “have” to bid on it. I had already done the research of closed auctions for comparable M5s, but I didn’t even need to. I knew these cars inside and out, and I knew this was a car that should sell in the upper $30K range all day long.
Armed with that knowledge and without anyone (there) to tell me I shouldn’t do it, I decided I would get in on the action with some strict ground rules—(1) set a price at which the car has instant value/equity and (2) don’t chase it past that number! With about an hour left in the auction, I jumped into the deep end with a $27,500 bid well below my $33K max that I never intended to hit . . . and which I thought might have been below the reserve. Not long after my entry, a couple bidders pushed the bids up to $30K, but, again, it was less action and a lower price than I knew this car was worth. Oh man, what to do?!? At this point, I became a shark with blood in the water. Time was running out, and I knew I might be able to “steal” this car if the stars aligned, so I made my next bid of $30,750 with two minutes left. I was displaced at $32K a minute later with only a minute left to go. I was just about at my limit with about 30 seconds to go when I decided to lob one last shot and then back off. So I tacked on a measly $250 to set the current high bid at $32,250. I was certain I would be outbid, and I still thought the reserve was in play, but the clock kept ticking down . . . 20, 19, 18 . . . . As I paced around the yard waiting for disappointment to set in imminently, I started to get nervous . . . what if I win?!? 10, 9, 8, 7 . . . 3, 2, 1 . . . “Sold on 10/5/20 for $32,250 to CTug.” NO. WAY. I CAN’T BELIEVE IT! These were the thoughts running through my mind when reality sunk in that I just bought a car, my first in an online auction!
While I knew the value of cars and that I had instant value in this M5, I had no clue what to expect next in the process to complete the transaction. Despite getting an email with instructions from BAT, something was amiss. When I connected with the seller, Jean, for the first time, he informed me that my bid price did not meet the reserve he set, and he was surprised BAT marked the car as sold. Given my shock and lack of preparation to actually purchase the car, I tried to be transparent and have an easy-going attitude. I told Jean I was surprised I got the car at the price I did and that I wanted it, but that I would let him out of the sale if he could sort it out with BAT. BAT was quick to say no to his request. My bid was close enough to the reserve that it decided to cover the difference and still be net positive on the transaction from the 5% buyer’s fee I had to pay. So the car would be mine, and I was excited, but what would I tell my wife?!?
“Honey, I accidentally bought a car” was my opening salvo. She didn’t immediately get the reference to “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” and she thought I was joking because I was always looking at, and talking about, buying cars without actually doing it. But this time was real! The bad news was she didn’t like the surprise, as she always wants to be a part of the decision-making process, but the good news was she didn’t kick me to the curb, as she begrudgingly understood my rationale for buying the car at value. Then I convinced her it could be a family car to replace our 2008 X5 4.8i, which had become a maintenance nightmare.
The next day I met up with Jean, and we completed the transaction. I was so happy and instantly loved the car, as it was everything I knew it would be and more! A few years later, I had to let go of the car more unexpectedly than I bought it at a value of almost $44K. I was vindicated in my purchase, but you’ll have to read about the luckiest day of my life to appreciate how bittersweet our parting was.
