I understand the seller.
There's a HUGE if not MASSIVE difference and distinction between what you may sell piecemeal in the parts arena, and a collection of over 100,000 OEM parts occupying a large warehouse. In your case as is the case of others, your buyers may come and go for a part, a couple of parts, or even a small collection. You don't know where they are coming from, or when the next customer will come from. Cherry pickers? Sure. But some parts have very little value and others quite a bit. You need to be able to accept that fact, and take good money for the good parts, and next to nothing for the oddball parts with little market, and thus market value. Your alternative is to warehouse them for another day, month, week, year or decade...
Now in this case, the number of
people that would have need for this parts collection is essentially non-existent. The number of
firms that could possibly deal with such a collection are very few, and they would be required to have an active and robust restoration business spanning a number of models across decades. They'd also be required to find amongst those 100,000 parts enough "cherries" to make moving and warehousing all this material--including ongoing maintenance of the parts, tagging them with part numbers, etc. worth their while. This is a massive project even for the huge operations that can deal with this.
The
auction house knows that. Not certain if the
seller does. Wisely, the cars are being sold individually.
[Before we moved from Michigan to NC, we needed to pare down our possessions. We had a massive collection of both vinyl and CDs of music, ten big boxes. Nothing particularly rare or valuable. We took it to a used record store, and they "cherry picked" about 30% of the collection (more than I expected) and offered a fair price. As the owner reached out to my wife to shake her hand, I said "wait!". Take the rest for another $25. We went home with an empty trunk and a fair price + $25. Some young kid working there said, "Boss, we can always put the stuff you don't really want in the dollar bin...". Smart kid.]
I suspect that if this lot of parts sells in this round of the auction, we will all know the name of the firm that buys it. If it doesn't go--they'll probably be a re-thinking of how to position this for sale.
