Parts Trend - What's with the asinine Pricing?

[NorCam]

OK...not to start a rant or throw anyone under the bus, but I've been in the hobby a long time want to share my sentiment on classic car parts and the flat out greed of many pickers and parts re-sellers.

I'll start by saying that not many years ago, I completed 2 frame off restorations where a lot of rare and original OEM parts were bought through this forum, T/C, and from other like minded collectors. Sure the rarer the part or the better the condition, the higher the price realized, but what's with this trend of flat out greed the last couple of years (especially through eBay)? Almost every GM part you see listed or described has a reference to Z/28, Copo, Yenko, LS6, L78, L88, NOS or "Survivor" to simply justify the asinine pricing attached to the item? I mean are anchored bolt sets really worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars, is a used plastic grill really worth 3K, is an old worn out shifter worth $1200, is a used gear set worth thousands of dollars, is a script top cap worth $800, and who in their right mind can ask several thousand dollars for a block without it actually being magged, machined and cleaned prior to demonstrating its absurd price?

Suffice to say the asking price of certain items or date stamped parts have far exceeded the values of the cars they once belonged to. One case in point is an item I had been watching the forum classifieds for, and one day it surfaces. As often occurs, it was a collector passing a nice item along and it was priced quite fairly (as often happens between collectors). The down side is that I saw the ad one hour after it was posted and it had already been spoken for and purchased by a known re-seller. That same re-seller listed the part elsewhere within hours for double the price, and one that far exceeded it's actual market value by 40% to 50%.

What's really disturbing is that too many people (in my mind) are now overpaying for these items rather than sitting on their wallets and saying screw that (i'm not paying an absurd price for that item no matter how bad I want it). I agree that many in the car hobby want the best of the best, the rarer or actual NOS parts for their special car, but in my mind it really is getting completely out of hand. I mean it's like every half decent part that is now listed has an asking price like it belongs to the only known survivor car from its class? In fact, if most of us bought a car missing many of its original numbers correct parts today and wanted to restore it to stock, the sum of the costs for its parts would put the price of the finished car well over the cars actual market value. In actuality, the cars have not increased in their base values based on anything near to the increase in the parts so sooner or later one thing has to gotta go pop.

Either people will get tired of the asking price for some of the parts and there will be a serious correction factor, or the price of the cars the parts belong to will increase in value where buying the overpriced parts is simply more justified. I don't see that happening anytime soon and figure that sooner or later people will simply get tired of seeing some of the ridiculous asking prices for parts. And this isn't just the really rare stuff, but much of the common line part numbers which cross over as well. To me it also fuels the requirement for the repop parts, and thankfully there are some good parts coming out now that have far exceeded the OEM quality with prices being 75% less than what some pirates in the hobby are asking for stuff. (not intended as a comment to upset the purists, but it is getting better on many of the parts being controlled through reputable parts houses)

Again...this post is not intended to insult or throw anyone in particular under the bus. My intention here is to discuss the increasingly alarming price of parts versus the values of the actual cars they go onto. The last point I would make to this discussion is this simple analogy; If a numbers matching car was to actually follow and increase with the value of its parts today, a common 69 Z/28 would then be worth 150K. They are now selling between 55K and 75K on average with the finer specimens achieving 100K. What would you say if in 2 years from now, the prices of a given Z/28 rose to 150K? Would you buy one if the market went that way or all sellers started asking those kind of numbers? Or would you simply say not in this lifetime? Maybe change you focus to another genre or another model and blame it on greed?

Appreciate you thoughts on feedback on the trend of late? [img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/Can-I-Have-It.gif[/img]