More customers are building classic motorcycle collections with me, as an alternative to saving for a pension. All of them ride their bikes, as do nearly all of my clients. When we sit down to talk through what they want, I ask them to be frank about how important the investment side of such a purchase is. It is always a large driver for them, but we always make sure that they buy a collection of motorcycles that they like and enjoy.
There is a lot of drilling down, this is not just a whim, or buy a bunch of classic motorcycles and hope that they increase in value. Previous clients have bought a number of machines over the years without really thinking about it. They have all made great profits on their motorcycle collection, but if we had planned the collection then they could have bought far wiser. They sort of stumbled into it and I am now spending more time with clients designing their motorcycle collections with them. Not only do such collections perform so much more efficiently, regarding achieving the best returns, but the clients look at machines they would not have considered before. Machines that become a great discovery for them. They may have heard of such classic motorcycles, but never paid them any attention, certainly not enough to have invested in them. I enjoy this type of work, because they discover the history and context of such classic motorcycles, and I have the pleasure of watching their passion ignite.
They plan their motorcycle collection and we curate it together. It becomes quite obsessive for many of them and we adhere to extremely high standards. The way we work out whether a motorcycle will increase in value more than another is a scientific process. It requires sales figures from the last forty years, how many machines were produced, how popular the motorcycle was, how iconic it was, it’s place and context in motorcycling history.
It also requires looking at similar machines to identify trends. For example, at the time of writing this, Honda CB750 Sandcasts have increased by over 100% in the last two years. Honda built 7,400 of these machines. Kawasaki’s 1972 Z1 900 has only increased by about 20% in the same time. They built 5,000 of them and the first 1,200 are very different, almost like prototypes. All of these machines are far more rare than the Honda Sandcast and are just as iconic. Prior to the increase in values of Sandcasts, the 1972 Z1 900 was always around the same price as a Honda Sandcast. Therefore, it is easy to see that 1972 Kawasaki Z1 900s are about to increase very rapidly in value.
As well as thorough originality and mechanical investigation, there is an awful lot of context and market knowledge required to curate a profitable motorcycle collection. On top of which, there is an awful lot of actual classic motorcycle sales data about previous motorcycle sale prices- not from eBay- but of proper investment grade classic motorcycles. There is a science behind this market, it is not about guess work or hope.
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