What happened to the reasonably priced project car?

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they have steadily been going up in price..

trucks and wagons have been and are still really hot right now.. vans are going nuts too these days..
Bought my running/driving 67 A100 van in 2004 for $900, used it for a daily driver, fixed things as I went, almost had it sold in 2014 for $5200 (but thankfully got cold feet) and now that it’s officially a money pit (with more money blown on it then I’ll ever get back!) have it fully covered for $12,000. The throwing of money at this pit is going nuts!:realcrazy:
 
Advertised it on CL and FB Marketplace for several months here in S E Tx for $3500 firm.

maybe in texas they are cheap but you sold it way too cheap for the north east thats for sure. 6 cyl hurts it some but it was a good year and good body would bring double easily here...
 
maybe in texas they are cheap but you sold it way too cheap for the north east thats for sure. 6 cyl hurts it some but it was a good year and good body would bring double easily here...
I agree But I also lived in Missouri for37 years . Things are cheaper there yet!!! Yo are in NJ and I am not!!! ha
I id finally sell off two mostly done cars this month. One to Fl and other to N Y. It is hard to find anyone that wants to pay shipping even to get a car well worth the $. I see what the average project looks like back East and I shake my head.

I have loved 68-9 Runners and Bees for decades but I can not swallow the price of a project car in those flavors now days. Back in the 90's I could buy a runner 68-9 for $1000-1500 back in Mo. I would do a nut and bolt resto, rebuild the engine, trans, Legendary interior, the while deal and advertise it in Hemmings, MCG and it would bring $7500 maybe 8500 tops. Yes I said back in the 90's! I made almost nothing. But I could take that same project, clean it up and tune it a little, run an ad and make $1000-1500 easy. Still that way with restoring one. But the $5000 project RR now days, is not worth that price you have to pay to own it!! If I paid that $5000 for said turd project today, and did a nut/bolt job on it , I still would not make a dime and would have to sell it for $25000-30,000 to get my $ back out. Yep it is a hobby! But I can not buy into having that many $ is such just for a toy and I just don't have such!
Rather work on my 64 post Savoy roller I got for $1200 or my 64 more door Belvedere runner I traded and got $500 in. Thanks to a FABO member for the heads up on the Savoy.
 
It’s all relative. When I bought my brand new Tor Red 340 4 speed Duster for $2805 I made 1.60 hour. At the end of 72 or first part of 73, I bought a new 71 Hemi GTX for $3975. Sure we would all like to see those days again. But it ain’t gonna happen.
 
Yesterday I went to look at a 72 Challenger. Guy wants $5000 for it. This was a /6 car with no engine or trans. He said it had interior in it. When I get there to look it over, There isn't a piece of sheet metal on it not rotted out. No floor pans . Grill was all beat up. Had extra plastic interior pieces thrown in it , all faded to a white chalk. . Looked like the remains of a slap stick in the floor. Now this Jewel did have the Rallye Hood, maybe usable included. AND it still had an 8 3/4 rear in there. People are out of there frickin minds on prices.
This car was so bad I didn't even insult him with an offer !
And He also had a 72 Charger with a big block in it for $8000. He said would run and drive, but looked in the same condition.
 
Yesterday I went to look at a 72 Challenger. Guy wants $5000 for it. This was a /6 car with no engine or trans. He said it had interior in it. When I get there to look it over, There isn't a piece of sheet metal on it not rotted out. No floor pans . Grill was all beat up. Had extra plastic interior pieces thrown in it , all faded to a white chalk. . Looked like the remains of a slap stick in the floor. Now this Jewel did have the Rallye Hood, maybe usable included. AND it still had an 8 3/4 rear in there. People are out of there frickin minds on prices.
This car was so bad I didn't even insult him with an offer !
And He also had a 72 Charger with a big block in it for $8000. He said would run and drive, but looked in the same condition.

sounds about right for an E body.
 
A few months before I joined FABO, I bought a 72 Duster from a member here. It was a 318/904 bench seat car, IIRC it was a "Gold Duster", was a very solid car, had a couple of patches and a few other metal repairs done. The engine was not #s, but it ran and drove, had small bolt aluminum slotted wheels on it, and was very complete. I paid 5k CAD for it, and had a good plan for what I was going to do with it. Then I bought the 75 Dart Sport for $800.00, and soon after decided that I wasn't really wanting to spend another $35k on the Duster to make it what I had planned. I sold the Duster for $5500.00 CAD, sight unseen to someone else who was looking to get into the hobby at a reasonable cost. I think I have now invested about another 4k into the Dart Sport, and I am not expecting to get much deeper into it, but it will still need some more work to get it reliable. Should I have stayed with the Duster? Maybe, but it ain't worth worrying about.
 
I was fortunate to have met a friend who was really into restoring mopars before I bought mine. I had been out of olds cars for so long I had no idea of the cost of parts and services. If he hadn’t wised me up, I would have likely bought a project car expecting to spend $5k repairing it and wound up at 30 or 40. I think this happens to a lot of folks.
 
I'm just going to fix up what I have and sell the rest.
I will not pay 5 grand for a wrecked, rusted, shell of a '69 Coronet or Road Runner, and then spend 20 grand to make it barely road worthy without paint or anything fancy and countless hours to do so, even if it's ultimately what I really am looking for..........
Besides, I'm getting too old to do major rustorations.
 
all this is why i bought a modern mustang.. 14k for a 2008 gt with only 7400 miles on it.. still smells new inside.. awesome car.. still have the dart and probably won't sell that any time soon unless someone offers an amount we can't refuse.. i can say that the prices for mopars and their parts are quickly taking the fun out of the mopar hobby for me..
 
all this is why i bought a modern mustang.. 14k for a 2008 gt with only 7400 miles on it.. still smells new inside.. awesome car.. still have the dart and probably won't sell that any time soon unless someone offers an amount we can't refuse.. i can say that the prices for mopars and their parts are quickly taking the fun out of the mopar hobby for me..

I have been thinking along similar lines. When I consider the money it will take to buy a driver quality E or B body (25-40k??) that puts me in range of some pretty nice Challengers / Mustangs / corvettes.
 
I have been thinking along similar lines. When I consider the money it will take to buy a driver quality E or B body (25-40k??) that puts me in range of some pretty nice Challengers / Mustangs / corvettes.

exactly.. people can bash modern muscle but man they out perform the classic in every way possible. can personalize them just as you can a classic too...
 
I'm just going to fix up what I have and sell the rest.
I will not pay 5 grand for a wrecked, rusted, shell of a '69 Coronet or Road Runner, and then spend 20 grand to make it barely road worthy without paint or anything fancy and countless hours to do so, even if it's ultimately what I really am looking for..........
Besides, I'm getting too old to do major rustorations.

You are like so many of us here who got in the Muscle car deal before they all got rusty lol.... A 1970 Duster is over 50 years old. And rust never sleeps. The generation behind me will never know how good I had it finding deals on cars and I suspect the same would be said by the generation ahead of me.

Eventually enough people will throw the towel in on restoration work. It's just a matter of time. And them the market will hold value for only select cars. The rest will turn into Beer can's I suppose. But when I see a stand 318 Duster go up for sale at 15k (no offense) that just blows my mind. I wouldn't have the audacity to ask it personally. But I was around in a time where $600.00 would get you that nicer...

JW
 
I guess that I may be the only person out there that doesn’t want to restore every car I get. I don’t mind spending money on my cars, and I’ve restored a few things in my time, but always with patience and time spent over years to do so. Good deals on cars can still be had out there if you have patience and wait for the right deal to come along. I find good deals on cars all the time, and try to pass those deals on to folks who would take the cars to the next level. I will generally put some time into a car to get it to a point where someone can see their vision in it, and all without just opening the catalog and whipping out the credit card. Things like rims and tires can be found cheap, and they go a long way to build excitement and vision on a car. That’s the fun part of the hobby for me, and I doubt that will ever change. I’m just old school I guess.

Every single one of these cars I’ve sold in the last 5 years was bought and sold for less than $2500, all with time spent to improve them along the way.

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I can buy this car near me for $1200. The guy bought it just for the rocker trim for his car. /6 car, super solid

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The market seems to be compressing some the last several years. The big dollar cars appear to be coming down and the low dollar cars are going up.

As many of us old guys who were around when the cars were new are now in drool bibs or dying off, the market seems to be shifting. The younger generation who were not around when these cars were new don’t seem to care about the whole numbers matching thing. They would rather have a restomod.

I don’t really know where the muscle car / old car market is heading. The prices old Broncos, farm trucks and Volkswagens are bringing is mind numbing. Who could have imagined that ten years ago.
 
The younger generation who were not around when these cars were new don’t seem to care about the whole numbers matching thing. They would rather have a restomod.

ofcorrse they do.. they want power, handling, stopping and modern comfort in a classic car they can use instead of like the old heads that were happy to practice professional parking while and some lame bass show for 8 hours or just have their car for some garage art.
 
I bought this for $5900 back in 2015 as you see it in the photo. Good cars are still out there.

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I will start this off with a warning that this is a whiney rant. But what happened to the cost of A-Bodies? I got my 69 Dart for $400 in 03. It didn't run but everything was there for it to run and drive except for the fact that cosmetically, it was garbage.

As I drink my coffee and browse through the for sale ad's I cant help but have noticed that within the past year or so, everything has gone way up in price. What typically was a $1500 car is now about $3-5000. I live in the SF bay area where things cost a little more anyways but man! Its out of hand lol.

Did the Coronavirus drive up the pricing for everything? Its crazy that you can't even find a decent A-Body that doesn't have rust issues everywhere and a clear title for less than $3000.

Crazy stuff! Rant over.

Most sellers will ask more than they expect to get, naturally. I effortlessly picked up a 75 Valiant for $1800 instead of the $2500 the guy wanted. All I had to do was ask. On the other hand, you can still find some absolute bargains, even if they're far and few between. My 89 Fifth Avenue cost $400. All it would've needed to be a driver was tires and a battery, but it's more valuable as a parts car for me.

I agree, affordable projects are getting hard to come by. It's discouraging, because the price can so easily wipe out a high school kid's dream of driving a four door rusted out slant six Dart to school.
 
The market seems to be compressing some the last several years. The big dollar cars appear to be coming down and the low dollar cars are going up.

As many of us old guys who were around when the cars were new are now in drool bibs or dying off, the market seems to be shifting. The younger generation who were not around when these cars were new don’t seem to care about the whole numbers matching thing. They would rather have a restomod.

I don’t really know where the muscle car / old car market is heading. The prices old Broncos, farm trucks and Volkswagens are bringing is mind numbing. Who could have imagined that ten years ago.
I can tell you where our hobby is most likely headed. I’m 65 when I was maybe 14-16 and a budding motor head, most of the older motor heads were into Ford model A’s or T’s weather stock or hot rod. As they grew older and died off the affection and draw of these old cars has kinda withered. As my generation gets older the muscle car draw will fade away.
 
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