Tastes change
The next development in the collectors car market happened in the late 1980s when a new buyer emerged in the international car marketplace. Japanese buyers were cashed up. The Yen was strong. The Tokyo real estate market was booming, and they looked overseas for investment vehicles (if you will pardon the pun). And they looked for Ferraris.

For the first time, top-end Japanese buyers looked to the automotive heritage of the world driven by both collecting passion and collecting value.

In November 1989, Takeo Kato paid the top price ever for a car up to that time: $13.3 million plus commission. He was competing with the baby boomers in the U.S. and Europe who could afford to buy the cars they drooled over in their youth.

Bubbles, however, always burst, and so it was that Kato's car was sold in 1994 for $2.7 million to a British dealer.

The recession of the 1990s tended to halt the extraordinary gains over the mid to late 1980s, but it was only a temporary setback. Some price guides have indicated that collector car prices have risen by 200 percent in the last 20 years.

The 1990s marked a change in the collector car market. The great collectors who desired the great cars of the 1920s and 1930s were beginning to die out. The cars that made Pebble Beach the premier car show in the world were no longer so desired by the new buyers entering the market.

The market for pre-WWII cars was contracting, and cars from the 1950s and 1960s were on the march. The baby boomers wanted cars from their youth, and they could now afford them.

The rise of the prewar cars with collectors, then the decline, and then the rise in the chrome cars of the 1950s, was followed by the rise in interest in muscle cars: high horsepower large cars from the 1960s and 70s made by Detroit to satisfy the demand created by the rising middle class in America.

Enter the auction
In the last 15 years, the classic car auction market has blossomed to unprecedented levels.

Car sellers internationally like classic car auctions. In a rising market, it provides a stable platform to find out the market price for their car which they bought hoping it would increase in value.

The market internationally is now dominated by three major players:

- Gooding and Company operated by David Gooding
- RM Sotheby's under the control of Rob Myers
- Bonhams owned by Robert Brooks and Evert Louwman

And underneath these three companies are many more local auction houses such as Artcurial in France which has a car department as part of its fine art auctions portfolio.

The question of how big the classic collector car market is worldwide is the subject of much debate. In the 2014-15 auction season, the Classic Car Auction yearbook records 243 sales over the U.S. million-dollar mark.

It also makes the point that since 1993, 65,000 collector cars have come to auction. Some cars, of course, have been offered a number of times during the intervening years.

For what I have called Enthusiast Cars, the market is far bigger. Hagerty Insurance, the American classic car insurer, says there are roughly 5 million cars in this market in the U.S., and 58 percent of those cars are owned by baby boomers. The baby boomers are approaching 70 years of age and are finding their children are not as enthusiastic for these cars as they were when they were their age.

The starkest proof of this is the number of full collections of high value that have come on the market in recent years. The Pinnacle Portfolio became the most valuable single-owner car collection ever sold at auction, selling for $67 million and along the way breaking records for individual models.

Next was the $54 million Andrews Collection, the Pratte Collection ($40 million), the Milhous Collection ($38 million), the Otis Chandler Collection ($36 million) and the much acclaimed so-called "barn find" Baillion Collection in France that netted more than $28 million.

Perhaps there are 10,000 true collectors cars in the world. I think it is difficult to say as it is a constantly moving number as new cars become just a little older and are replaced by new models.

Ferraris are still the leading brand with 576 cars sold at auction with an average hammer price of $924,000. This represents a drop of 21 percent in value last year, but the average prices are highly dependent upon the stock which comes onto the market.

The question of what is now driving prices internationally can be seen in the age proportions of various cars being sold at auction. We are now seeing the emergence of the Post-Classics (cars built from 1965 to 1974) and the so-called Modern Classics (cars built from 1975 to 1999).

Within this market, we are also seeing micromarkets, such as Porsche cars being sold from America back to Europe. More were sold in America than in the home markets and Europeans are buying them back.