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MG MGA - Thinking of purchasing....

Mark Welcome aboard. The MGA Newsletter for this month has just been circulated. There is an article and a table compiled by Howard Quayle that may be of interest to you and others. The article is below and the table (PDF) I have converted to an image. If you can't read all the detail in the table let me have your email and I will forward it. Steve MGAs For Sale: Pricing Review- January 2016 by Howard Quayle In recent years, prices of MGAs have risen rapidly, but I am not aware that any detailed analysis has been carried out, or of any in-depth look at pricing variations between the various models. This article sets out to provide helpful information on this topic, although, as always, 100% accuracy can never be guaranteed. Where did I get the information from? The sources were probably not exhaustive, but came through a reasonably wide variety of advertisers. The majority of the MGAs were taken from the website: http://www.carandclassic.co.uk - which is generally a good barometer of the state of the classic car market. I also searched E-Bay for other MGAs for sale and not on the “Car & Classic” website, and finally augmented the list from classified adverts both from “Safety Fast!” and from “Enjoying MGA”. I am sure that I could have cast the net wider, but am happy that the base list contained enough entries to produce useful results. How many cars did I include? Using the above sources, on 6 December 2015, I found 82 MGAs for sale and qualifying for inclusion. 61 were on offer in the UK, with most of the remainder for sale in continental Europe. For various reasons, I did not include MGAs for sale outside Europe, as (for example, in the USA) these did not display registration plates, although single examples from Canada and New Zealand are included because their plates could be seen in the photos. In the five weeks between 6 December and 12 January 2016, a further 12 vehicles came onto the market, although it must be assumed that some of the original 82 MGAs had been sold in the meantime. In the next three weeks, another 14 vehicles had appeared, so it appears that 3-4 “new” MGAs come onto the market each week. This is not very scientific, but it gives a good indication. The attached tables therefore analyse 105 records. (Three were discounted for pricing purposes, as they were imported vehicles requiring complete or substantial renovation. The asking prices were sufficiently low to have skewed the data). You will see that six records are classified as “Unclear”: this is where advertisers had incorrect data (e.g. a 1955 1500 Coupe, 1967 1600 Roadster, etc), and so I have excluded these from the pricing analysis. I will let the pricing data data speak for itself. It is based on average prices for each model, although the low numbers of some of the variants on offer will not have provided results with a high degree of confidence- samples of one (e.g . the 1959 1600 Mk1 Coupe) are not ideal! On the volumetric data, it is not surprising that around half the vehicles for sale were 1500 Roadsters and Coupes. Three-quarters of the MGAs on offer were through dealers, with presumably a large percentage of these being sold on a commission basis – is this because dealer sales realisations are likely to be higher than prices obtained through private sales? I hope that readers will find this analysis enjoyable and interesting.

Steve Gyles

Is this the sort of thing you are looking for. I was waiting for spring (nearly there) to advertise. 1960 1600 and it does look as good "in the flesh" as in the picture.

A J Dee

This thread was discussed between 24/03/2016 and 25/03/2016

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