OUR SURVEY PARAMETERS
Thanks to Corvettes numbers man, Peter Graham, we are able to provide you with a summary of all the Corvettes advertised for sale on the premier Australian automotive sales site, CARSALES.COM. While not all cars are advertised on this site, most of them do find their way here. So, although we will obviously miss a few, the numbers and averages, etc, should generally give a very good indication of what is going on in the market.
We also make the assumption that if a car disappears off the Carsales listing, it has been sold, and sold at the listed price. Again, this will not always be accurate, but it will give a good general indication of how the market is behaving.
Corvettes Australia plans to report each month on these numbers so we can spot any trends; either for a particular Generation of Corvette or for the whole Corvette used car market.
While the total cost of what it would cost you to buy all the cars and the size of the “chook shed” you would need to house them all may not be applicable to everyone, Peter is sure this must be of vital information to someone !! Possibly more important is the value of the first prize in Powerball, which would certainly help with buying all the cars and building that super-sized chook shed.
As of the start of the new year (2024) there were 112 Corvettes listed for sale on Carsales.com, with a total value of A$16,130,062, while during the previous month there were 36 cars removed from the Carsales listing, presumed sold.
The generation with the largest number of Corvettes advertised was, as usual, the C8, with 34 cars listed. This accounted for 30% of all Corvettes listed. You will notice on the first page of the website, where C8 sales are listed, there has been a total of 565 C8 Corvettes officially sold in Australia since sales began in January 2022. This means 6% of the C8s sold are currently up for resale on Carsales. In fact, we have calculated that some 40% of all the C8s imported by GMSV have already been put up for sale on Carsales.
Not far behind the C8s came the C3s, with 31 listed. The C3s comprised 28% of the cars advertised, only 3 cars behind the C8s. However, in the case of the C3s for sale, only 5 appear to have been sold. The generation completing the top three positions was the C4, with 16 advertised (14% of total) and 6 being apparently sold. This is almost a 30% sales rate, which is quite a good result. This is reflective of the C4s selling at a lower price than other generations. They are a good entry level car for Corvette lovers.
It seems obvious that many of the people who purchased new C8s did so on the basis they would move them on at a profit. It is possible some of these people decided they did not like their C8s, but this seems unlikely except for a handful. Looking at the 19 C8s that were removed from Carsales and the average apparent selling price of $245,601, there would seem to still be a little profit left in the cars. The fact that some 55% of the C8s on offer were sold shows that there is currently still a market for used C8s. However, once the average asking price gets down to around $230K, it should cost about the same to buy a new C8 than to buy a used one. The waiting time for a C8 also seems to be quite reasonable now, meaning you can tailor a car to your own specification rather than compromising with one that is on offer.
Apart from the 19 C8s that were removed from Carsales during December, the C4 was the next highest seller with 6 removed, then the C3 with 5 removed. All the other generations saw sales of just one or two per generation. With the influx of LHD C5s, now that they can be put on a Club Permit, it is interesting that only one disappeared from Carsales, while at the end of the month, there were 12 advertised – a low hit rate.
It is also interesting to note that the number of Corvettes removed from the Carsales site has been relatively constant as is the number of cars listed. Normally at this time of year there is a drop-off for sales. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next month or two.
