Hagerty's Valuation Data: The Secret Sauce in Collector Car Insurance

“Valuing these cars was so tricky because there was a lot of opinions about what cars were worth, but not a lot of really good data. And so, you know, as we were investing in the media pieces talking about cars and entertaining people, we built the data resources. We call it our Automotive Intelligence Group. We have by far the richest sets of data about how to value these things. And it's down to that VIN or serial number you know, you mentioned how does a big insurance. Company, you know, why didn't they do it?”

“And I remember this conversation years ago in one of those partner discussions where I mentioned the CEO as a car guy, really wanted to kind of compete with us, wasn't sure if you wanted to partner with us, And I said, well, do you know what a nineteen sixty nine Camaro is? And he said, I sure, do you know he's kind of pretty happy with himself. And I said, you may not know that. In nineteen sixteen and the Camaro came in one hundred and forty seven different variants, and that year the least expensive one was worth about eleven grand and the most valuable one was worth about one point one million. And you can't tell the difference by looking at them from the outside. You have to understand what that serial number is. And I said, we built a patented serial number decoder for all cars pre nineteen eighty one so that we could understand our universe and start providing that data. And that's why our partners like us. But it's real asset to have that kind of data to and then build on it every year.”

“You know, when somebody sells a car, it's also a data point, and so for us that that kind of data piece. And again it's all a big not just because I'm a car person. I view it as a flywheel. It's a flywheel and it all kind of spins, and insurance is a beautiful thing, but the rest of it speeds up the flywheel.”