What a Record-Breaking Monterey Car Week Signals for Your Book of Business

Monterey Car Week 2026 set an all-time record: $756 million in total auction sales across the industry. The previous record was $471 million, set in 2022. That’s not a modest improvement, it’s a 60% jump in a single year.

Ken Ahn, President of Hagerty Marketplace and co-founder of Broad Arrow Auctions, joined hosts John Gessner and Bryant Kolle on The Accelerator to break down what drove those numbers, what they actually mean for the broader market, and what agents should take away from it all.

Don’t Get Distracted by the Headlines

The record was fueled largely by the very top of the market. Modern supercars and hypercars have seen dramatic value increases. A Ferrari Enzo that averaged $5–7 million last year is now changing hands in the mid-teens. But Ken was quick to put it in context, average values across the collector car market are up roughly 30%, while median values are up only low single digits. The very high end is dragging the average up. For the core of the market, the vehicles most agents actually encounter, the conditions are relatively stable.

The bigger and more durable story isn’t that expensive cars are getting more expensive. It’s who is entering the hobby and what they’re buying.

A Generational Shift Is Already Underway

Baby boomers built enormous wealth during the peak decades of American and European car manufacturing, and the cars they loved as teenagers have been the backbone of the collector market for decades. Now that generation is slowing down, and those cars are increasingly coming to market.

At the same time, wealth is transferring to a smaller but significantly wealthy younger generation. Hagerty and Broad Arrow are seeing it directly: a surge of new registered bidders in their 30s, 40s, and early 50s with collectors who’ve never appeared in the data before. And the cars they want reflect their own nostalgia. As Ken put it, if you ask his son what his dream car is, the answer stops somewhere in the 1990s. Hagerty’s own quote data confirms the shift that requests from Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z customers are growing fast, and the vehicles they’re submitting increasingly skew toward 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s cars.

What This Means for Agents

None of this requires an $11 million client to matter. The collectors entering the hobby right now are buying cars they dreamed about in high school, inheriting a family vehicle, or finally treating a “fun car” as the special asset that it is. They are also at a stage of life where their broader insurance needs are getting more complicated. The collector car is often the conversation starter that opens the door to all of it.

The definition of what qualifies as a collector car is evolving alongside the people collecting them. That 1997 Trans Am with classic plates. The Miata that sits in the garage all winter. The Porsche Boxster someone has owned for 15 years. These don’t always read as collector cars to agents or even to their owners. But they are, and they deserve to be insured accordingly.

Expertise Matters and You Don’t Have to Have It All

Two cars that look identical on paper can carry dramatically different values depending on mileage, originality, and configuration. That gap between condition ratings has widened in recent years, meaning getting it right matters more than ever. The good news: agents don’t have to be the experts. Hagerty’s valuation tool is now free and available to anyone at hagerty.com. Enter a VIN and get a detailed picture of what the vehicle is worth and what makes it special. That is the starting point for the right coverage conversation.

The Opportunity Ahead

Ken closed with a Wayne Gretzky analogy that doubles as a pretty good playbook for agents. The question isn’t where the collector car market is right now, it’s where it’s headed. Younger collectors, different vehicles, more complex households. The agent who starts asking one or two extra questions is the agent who finds the opportunity before it’s obvious to everyone else.

The market is healthy, the hobby is growing, and the collectors of tomorrow don’t look like the collectors of yesterday. That’s exactly where the opportunity is.

Want to hear the full conversation?

In this episode of The Accelerator, Ken Ahn joins hosts John Gessner and Bryant Kolle to break down what drove a record-setting Monterey Car Week, the macro forces reshaping the collector car market, and what it all means for agents who are paying attention. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.