2001 Porsche Boxster S

This Boxster, item #1864044565, sold on eBay at no reserve for a price of $38,900, with 25 bids, on October 1, 2002. This price is so far below even the dealer wholesale market that in my view something may be amiss with this car or the sale.
Alternatively, Boxsters may simply be very soft right now, due to a confluence of factors such as the economy, the nearing of winter, and an excessive supply of both new and used Boxsters. The fact that Porsche North America sent out Boxster discount coupons to every PCA member makes clear the pliability in new Boxster prices. This weakness translates into poor used-car prices as well.
When Boxsters were new in 1997 and demand far exceeded supply, you could buy a new Boxster at list, drive it for a while, and sell it for about what you paid. The same was true for the Boxster S when introduced in 2000, but not for long. In today’s market, Boxsters are valued as used cars. They are depreciating, in some cases rather rapidly, and miles hurt as they accumulate.
Why are Boxsters depreciating so quickly? Over 120,000 Boxsters have been produced, and they are still cranking them out. From a corporate standpoint, it has been by far the most successful Porsche ever, because it has sold in vast volumes at big margins. As a new car, the allure may be fading a bit. But as a collectible car, they are nowhere. Due to the high unit volume, it will take a long time for these cars to become scarce, and until they do, they will continue a long slide downhill in value.
Then there is the eBay effect. I have long been a proponent of buying and selling parts on eBay. There is nothing quite as much fun as flipping on the computer and having a Porsche swap meet up and running 365-24-7. Do people rip you off on eBay? Sure, some do. Can you get a screaming good deal? Yep, if you’re lucky and clever. Just as at any swap meet, there are good guys and bad guys.
When it comes to like-new used exotic cars however, the formula changes a bit because of the presence of dealers in the buyer’s pool. They are always scouting for inventory, and their bids tend to keep the prices of late-model iron at or near wholesale.
But is this car, with ultra low miles and at $38,900, representative of other used Boxster S cars on the market? I have scanned the national market and found the cheapest 2001 S to have an asking price of $46,995. The average price, among the eight cars I located, was about $48,500. The cheapest of ten 2000 Boxster S models I located was $42,500, and it had 18,000 miles. Why was this one about $10,000 cheaper than the average 2001 S? I don’t know.
Why didn’t any dealers bid the car higher? For a Boxster S with these low miles to be worth this little raises red flags to me. Has the car been badly damaged? (The listing didn’t mention damage, and the Carfax report was clean.) It is hard to understand why a dealer would sell a car for what appears to be far less than he could get for it at wholesale. Are Boxster S models really sliding in value?
Did this sale actually go through as it appears? We don’t know. Normally in this case we would simply contact the buyer. But since the seller selected a “private sale,” the identities of the bidders are kept secret.
If this is a straight, no-stories car that really did sell, at first glance it appears that someone got a great deal on a Boxster S, and put it in their garage well below today’s market value. Of course, with late-model cars today’s price is surely higher than it will be tomorrow.-Jim Schrager