[sugarwood]

Just offering one possible slice of the whole picture. Like many of you, I enjoy browsing vintage cars for sale. I sometimes check out the BAT results, and it's fun to see what cars actually sell for.

I noticed that I don't even look at Ebay anymore. There is a finite amount of time one can waste on browsing cars on the internet. For a real buyer, Ebay may feel pointless since it's a decreasingly viable place to find a good car, since the signal to noise is so low. and most listings are crack pipe dealer cars that few people are actually going to buy, or hacked up turds that would never sell in person. It became a showcase for dealers and flippers. These auctions are boring, since most cars have crazy asking prices and never actually sell. There is no "action" to follow, which is part of the fun. Once the number of private party sales started to get drowned out by recurring ads of flipper cars in front of a curtain, I slowly stopped watching Ebay. I just delete the alert emails now. A typical buyer may tire of sifting through the extremes hoping to find a decent car that might actually sell for a decent price.

So, if I am a representative anecdote, my theory is that other people have also stopped looking at Ebay entirely, and have moved on BAT. So, does BAT steal eyeballs and gets the real buyers who have cash in hand, but don't want to pay crack pipe dealer prices, and are no longer willing to sift through Ebay for viable candidates?

Ironically, maybe the contrarian place to find a car is now Ebay, with an unnoticed private party listing, if there is indeed a trend of people not bothering to look at Ebay, as much as in the past.