Porsche Plans Crackdown on GT-Car Speculators and Flippers
Like many of the world’s most desirable cars, Porsche’s GT models attract the interest of buyers who are more keen to buy them as investments than for driving pleasure. But now the automaker says it is planning to crack down on those who have been betting on the rising value of some of its rarer GT variants and flipping them for profit.
“I personally like to see my cars being used. That’s what we build them for. They are just too good to be left to stand and collect dust,” Andreas Preuninger, Porsche’s head of GT road-car development, told us at the launch of the 2018 911 GT3. “I don’t like this business of people buying our cars to make money on them. That was never our intention. The purpose of limiting a car is not for it to gain value. We don’t want to be laying money on each car’s roof when they run out of the factory.”
Preuninger admitted that the decision to offer a manual transmission in the new GT3 has upset some buyers of the manual-only 911R, who fear their cars will lose some of the exclusivity that has propelled their values skyward.
“When I said we’re not a hedge fund, I’m talking to those people who are yelling at us for offering the manual transmission similar to the R,” he said. “But if there are people wanting to buy cars like that, then as a company we should try to fulfill that, to meet that demand.”
While it’s hard to prevent buyers from selling cars for a profit, Preuninger said that doing so will mean such a customer is far less likely to be able to buy one of Porsche’s limited-production GT specials in the future.
“We are monitoring very closely who is flipping cars,” he said. “We do not build too many cars and we know most of our customers well—we like to have a name for every car before we build it.
If you’re flipping cars, then I think it’s understandable that you won’t get on the list for the next car if we have more demand than supply,” Preuninger concluded. “It’s not a punishment but a strategy: to supply the cars to the customers who will really use them. I think that’s just fair.”
