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Updated through yesterday's record auction (RYP '08 CR #534 AC/Audio, $122.5K+fees=$127.5K total). The pandemic-era's upward price trend seems to show no signs of slowing, especially for the nicest examples. A couple notable examples: This 62,000-mile '04 was sold in November for $30K, 2.5 years (and 8K miles) after selling for $17.3K. That's a 73% increase! Likewise, this 2,800-mile '08 sold in December for $51.5K, an appreciation of $4.5K (9.6%) in the eight months that its buyer held it after winning it on BaT last April.
On the weaker end, this 77K-mile '07 was the first-ever auction won by the ubiquitous bidder BaTuser3 -- on their 2,424th bid! Longtime (and even casual) BaT followers recognize BaTuser3 for their habit of staking one or two very early (and usually very low) bids in hundreds upon hundreds of auctions, especially Hondas. In this case --not least because it was a No Reserve auction-- their early $15.5K bid was nearly good enough. Although it was edged out immediately by $250, that bargain price stuck right up till the last day. With an hour to go, they incremented to $16K, and surprisingly no-one challenged in the closing minutes. That auction, which closed Oc. 16, remains the first and only S2000 since Jan. 2020 that has sold on BaT for less than $20K. Despite (or because of?) the win, BaTuser3 remains active: at last check, they're at 2,654 bids and counting. (No word on their credit score, given that each bid incurs a credit card authorization. )
That CR result makes you wonder how high a DELETE model would go in the same condition/low mileage. 175?
That 07 was no deal to anyone that read the body shop docs. That thing had most of the bolt on panels replaced, both quarters pulled and bondo'd, bunch of suspension parts replaced, airbags... Probably should have been totalled. That was a fair price at best. I'm surprised BAT agreed to list it.
I've just updated this tool through the latest completed auctions, and added some statistical metrics in two new views. The first new view shows the 12-month rolling averages of high-bid (including Reserve Not Met results) and vehicle mileage. (The 12-month rolling average at any time is the average over all auctions which concluded within the 12-month period prior to that date.) This view currently looks like this:
Next, to better visualize how the "value" of the S2000 is changing, I computed a "Cost Index" for each auction result as follows:
CostIndex = (HighBid/30,000) * (Mileage/30,000)
where the normalization factors were chosen to achieve an index value near unity (i.e., an auction price of $30,000 for a car with 30,000 miles would result in a Cost Index of exactly 1.) Note that for any single auction, the Cost Index is essentially meaningless: the largest value is nearly two thousand times the smallest! But when averaged over many dozens of results, this simple metric is surprisingly efficient at illustrating trends. Here is the plot of the 12-month average of Cost Index:
Note that until 2021, the average cost index hovered around (and usually just below) a value of 1.0. At that point, however, it began a steady increase, and recently peaked near 1.5! This is true despite the fact that the average vehicle mileage has also increased significantly over the past year. In other words, this simple Cost Index analysis seems to confirm the feeling that many have expressed over the past few years: S2000 values have gone up sharply, and stayed up.
What do you think? Are most S2000s bringing 40-50% higher prices than they would have three or four years ago, or is this trend only applicable for "BaT-caliber" cars (i.e. the very nicest examples)?
August 2022: Also that month, this 2,500-mile '08 Berlina Black/Red set a new record for unmodified base models, at $71K (later beaten only by the Imola Orange example above).
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