Auction Express
B. Mitchell Carlson and Dean Merrell reporting
GOODVIEW, Minn. _ While the Remlinger Muscle Car Museum in Goodview, Minn., has previously hosted collector car auctions, the sales were conducted by SG Auctions, an outside auction company. With the demise of SG Auctions during the pandemic last year, a new auction company was formed by staff from SG and the Remlinger museum: Rem-linger Collector Car Auctions. This new company had the advantage of having both experienced auction personnel and a proven excellent facility for conducting collector car auctions.
Remlinger’s first auction was conducted live (and with online bidding on the Proxibid.com platform) on June 4-5. Hot weather didn’t cook off any interest in the auction, with a large crowd of bidders and spectators for the first live collector car auction in the Winona area for a year and a half.
Friday was dominated by sub-$20,000 cars, and they generally sold well. At the end of the first day, 56 of the 94 cars sold for an almost 60% sell-through rate. Helping that figure was one dealer who purchased 20 of those cars as entry-level collector cars have been hard to find recently, and he told Old Cars that he came here intent on stocking up on inventory.
With generally better-condition and higher-valued cars auction on Saturday, the strong market seemed to actually play against sales, as consignors seemed to have rather unrealistic reserves over and beyond even the current market. The slower Saturday caused the sell-through rate to drop to 57.3% overall (199 cars offered, 114 sold) by the end of the auction. Offsetting that was some prudent wheeling and dealing at the
