On January 26, 2024, Bring a Trailer announced in a community post that the buyer’s fee cap will increase from $5,000 to $7,500 starting 1/29/24. It’s the first buyer’s fee increase the platform has rolled out since it started auctioning cars nearly a decade ago.
The new fee structure means buyers will pay more for any car that sells for more than $100,000. The new fee tops out at $7,500 (a $2,500 increase) when the lot price reaches $150,000 (a $50,000 increase).
But what does that actually mean for the platform? BaT is rarely one to toot its own horn, so this self-proclaimed Excel addict decided to figure it out.
Of the 728 lots listed on BaT in the last week (1/19/24 to 1/26/24), 594 lots were sold. Of those, 23 sold for between $100,001 and $150,000. Had the new fee threshold been in place for that time period, BaT would have made an additional $21,166.70 off those sales alone. But the biggest number is this: 41 lots sold for over $150,000, which would have netted an extra $2,500 in buyer’s fees each, for a total of $102,500. Add it all up and BaT would have collected $123,666.70 in new fees during a single week.
If that rate sustained for all 52 weeks in the year, Bring a Trailer would make over $6,400,000 more in just a single year. That’s millions gained from a change that would only have affected 10.8% of the lots sold during this sample timeframe.
Data source: Bring a Trailer Auction Results. These calculations only considered cars that actually sold — those that were withdrawn or did not meet reserve were excluded. Some deals probably fell through, but exactly how many is not known. 6.9% of lots sold were over $150k and 3.9% were between $100-$150k.
Although $6m+ sounds impressive already, that number might actually be on the small side. There’s a good chance that a random week in January actually falls short of an average week on BaT, especially given all the large collections that sell on the platform in a given year. But despite any assumptions and potential errors in this calculation, saying that Bring a Trailer is poised to make several million dollars a year from this change seems like a reasonable conclusion to make.
Perhaps the biggest assumption here is that the new fee structure won’t scare off buyers or sellers in any significant numbers. Of course, BaT themselves are surely banking on that as well, as their community post conveyed that they don’t plan on slowing down.
If you’ve been around a while, you’ll remember that it took the platform about four years to sell 10,000 lots and less than five more years to reach 100,000. If new lots keep coming at the pace we saw last week (792 a week), we’re going to see 100,000 posts every two and a half years. And at the rate Bring a Trailer is growing — especially if growth is where all this new money is slated to be spent — we’ll be celebrating #200,000 sooner than you might think.
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