The $1.4B auction website that some people still don’t know about

Haven’t heard of bringatrailer.com? You’re not alone. I often get calls from people looking to sell a car, and invariably it goes something like this:

“Got this old car to sell. Everyone says I should put it on that trailer website.”

“You mean Bring a Trailer?”

“Bring a who?”

In 2023, Bring a Trailer listed and sold 1.4 BILLION dollars worth of cars, more than all of the land-based auction houses combined. And yes, those auction houses had been watching. Bonhams, RM Sothebys, Gooding - they had all had begun transitioning to online auction formats to compete, but it was too late. Bring a Trailer had been building a user base of passionate, committed car nuts for over a decade by then, and had done it in a way that the established corporate players couldn’t easily replicate.

But until recently there were a good number of people in the hobby that had never even heard of the site. That mostly changed in 2020, when Hearst Media bought the company for an undisclosed sum. At that time, the pandemic had been fueling enormous growth of “BaT”, as thousands of car enthusiasts were stuck at home, shut off from car events, local gatherings, and land-based auctions. Suddenly, Bring a Trailer had become the 800-pound gorilla of the market.

Bring a Trailer was co-founded by Randy Nonnenberg in 2007. His day job was at BMW North America, but his hobby was searching through eBay and Craigslist for unusual cars. He created a blog to share his addiction, and soon found that there were lots of other similar minded enthusiasts that enjoyed commenting on the finds that he posted.

As a previous Stanford grad armed with an MBA, he was more than just a car guy, and in 2014 BaT launched its first ever car auction. Some of the purists grumbled, but the commenters kept commenting, now with the addition of the seller who would have to respond to them! And that was the hook, that was the day that the door was closed on eBay, and the BaT era had begun. The hook was transparency. No longer could sellers hide behind the anonymity of eBay, offering the wary public a two-sentence description and ten photos of their car. Now they had to get involved. Answer questions. Reveal the car they were selling. Take their place in a community where every listing, every user and every comment they made would be archived and searchable. Forever.

I was one of those eBay sellers back then, actually starting in 2001 when I transitioned from a career as an advertising photographer to instead focus my camera on cars that I could sell. I had always been a car guy, prone to fickleness, moving from one car to the next with a compulsive desire to experience them all. I got so used to the process of buying and selling old cars that the prospect of leaving the advertising world to become a used-car salesman just didn’t bother me that much. Now I was no longer just the ad photographer; I was also the art director, the media buyer and the sales executive.

One of my first purchases for resale was a triple black Mercedes 450SL that I bought from a dealer’s lot here in Portland. It seemed undervalued to me. I  put it up on eBay, bypassing their basic listing format and using my own html code to include over 100 photographs. Then I added a 2,000 word description that listed both the good and bad about the car. When I netted a $3000 profit from that car I knew that this business had legs.

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My photo studio soon transformed into a workshop for the small amount of cars I would generally handle, just two or three every month. My focus was on the unique: Mercedes from the 60’s, small British convertibles, quirky Citroens, vintage Volvos. While most other dealers were hot on the trail of muscle cars, I seemed to be attracted to the cars that (at the time) were being overlooked. I had the eBay formula down: provide an abundance of high quality photos paired with an unflinching description of the car’s strengths and weaknesses. It worked.

A good number of my eBay listings ended up being featured on Randy’s blog, and we exchanged a few emails over the years. I ended up meeting him in the summer of 2014 at a car show in Portland where he had set up a tent promoting his new auction platform. He explained that he had built the new platform for people like me; small dealers that hand pick their inventory, as well as the pool of dedicated car enthusiasts that he either knew personally or online. I told him on that day that his new auction platform had the potential to be a game-changer, but that I had some hesitations.

First among them was giving up the autonomy of writing my own descriptions. From the beginning, the auction listing descriptions on BaT were delivered in a very basic way, blandly written using a matter of fact tone. I totally understood that in doing so they were eliminating the waltzing hyperbole that smothers most car listings, but on the other hand, their writing tended to leave the reader a little uninspired. But looking back, this approach has served them well, and boosted their reputation as a fair arbiter. I eventually found that the comments section was where I could talk about my car’s attributes in more detail.

My other concern was the peanut gallery that lived in that comments section. In the beginning, BaT was only running a handful of new listings a day, so every veteran commenter was there to weigh in on them, including some with an ax to grind, oftentimes indiscriminate of their target. As a small business owner, this was an environment that I was naturally adverse to, especially coming into it with a 100% positive eBay rating that I had worked hard to build. It’s human nature to criticize, and overall the discourse on BaT in those early days was actually much more civil than what you’d find on most other car forums. Still, concerns remained.

Eventually I jumped in at the urging of a fellow dealer friend who was absolutely killing it on BaT. I followed his lead as best I could, but I must say that my first few auctions had a steep learning curve. My wife suggested that I kill the trolls with kindness, and that ended up being the right approach, one that I still utilize.

Nowadays, BaT averages over a hundred new listings a day, 7 days a week. The peanut gallery can’t keep up with them all, and on top of that, the overall tone has actually improved. Now there are real experts commenting, not just the armchair type. BaT has become a worldwide phenomenon, attracting the very best sellers and buyers in the marketplace. As always, the submissions are curated, only allowing cars that have special attributes to be listed.

I’m still finding oddball cars to list, but some American cars from my favorite eras (30’s, 40’s) are fading in popularity. Even domestic cars from the 50’s are losing their appeal, as buyers in their earning years are looking for cars from their youth (90’s). So, the 1953 Oldsmobile sedan that’s bone stock and original? Unless it has 10k original miles…weigh it. And the photographs that used to set me apart on eBay? Now everyone has a high quality camera built right in to the phone that they carry in their pocket.

My dealer friend has lost his perch as the “King of Bring a Trailer” (as I liked to call him), but he and I are still doing fine. Now there are multiple Kings, listing some pretty incredible cars. BaT has now surpassed 100,000 listings, including dozens that have sold for $1M+. Their top sale to date was a $5.36M Ferrari back in 2022.

And the variety remains. “Barn finds, rally cars, and needles in the haystack” was BaT’s original tagline, and it still holds true. There’s something for everyone on the site, and most of the original commenters still participate daily. I too read it daily, and still learn something new about old cars on a pretty regular basis. That’s fun.

Competitors have arisen. Cars and Bids, founded by YouTube star Doug DeMuro, features 1980 and newer vehicles. Pcar Market, which started off only featuring Porsches, has now expanded to other makes on a daily basis. Hemmings, the venerable “Bible of the Collector Car Hobby” has jumped in along with countless others, some with mixed results.

I’ve bought and sold on most all of them, but BaT remains my first choice. They’ve got the best user interface, free of ad clutter, and the highest user count of them all. Fairness and transparency hold first position. But ultimately what sets them apart is the same underlying concept that Randy started with: a place for people to gather and talk about cars.

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