Treasure Hunting Tips

Where to look? Is all that glitters gold?

Typically most buyers will look to the retail market to acquire their target trophy bottles. However, as with all things rare whisky it pays to do your research. Many iconic retailers of the past who have incredible choices, ranges and back catalogues of amazing bottles are not the only game in town!

Buying at retail

Whilst the choice may be vast our analysis suggests that buyers may not be getting the best of deals! Quickly looking at the top 100 most valuable bottles on The Whisky Exchange website on 23.5.17 and seeking to compare v recent auction prices (last 6 months so we get accurate and up to date data) we see the following over some 15 products (we could only find recent UK auction data points for 15 of the bottles):

In summary it suggests that you will over pay in all cases for the bottles we have been able to “benchmark”.

Buying at Auction

The collection above would cost £114,500 at The Whisky Exchange (inc VAT) and at auction (if you could find the same bottles, and they have appeared in the last 6 months, we checked) you would pay around £74,813 (inc buyers fees at 10%). This would result in a total saving of some £39,686! Enough to go and buy more super rare whisky to drink, collect or invest in.

The chart below shows the absolute savings for these “iconic trophy bottles” and suggests savings of almost £1,000 to £10,000 can be secured if you have the patience to purchase at auction.

The great thing about buying at retail is the immediacy and the control the buyer has over the price. Buying at auction is a more tricky experience where there are no guarantees that the bottle you really want is available. If it is coming up at auction are there likely to be other bidders and have you got the time to sit and watch the prices rise until you reach you max bid? Can you sneak in as the auction closes and put in one final winning bid to secure your prize? It seems to us that the huge savings available make the secondary market (auctions) well worth considering for tracking down that sought after bottle!

Looking at the percentages you could save buying at UK Auction v TWE they tend to be around the 30 to 50% mark although a few bottles can deliver massive savings – sometimes as much as nearly 250% !

Over this full collection we estimate you could save on average around 53%

Research

Obviously, key to all of this is research. Do your homework, look at previous auction sales results – most auction houses publish results from previous auctions.

Another quick way of checking the market is to look at something like wine searcher where they list data for bottles and their prevailing prices.

And of course your can use our RW101 Valuation tool and generate data rich and insightful information.

Buying Privately - Brokerage

Finally, many bottles are sold privately from seller to buyer without anyone tracking the prices and knowing what is going on. At RW101 we can absolutely track the UK auction market data and it gives us a powerful insight into the state of the market and the dynamics on a bottle by bottle basis and we can track if brands are up or down and if market sentiment is positive or negative for that brand or bottle! This forensic detail, now covering some {{numberOfBottles}} different bottles with {{numberOfSales}} price records is the next step for creating a more professional way of understanding the rare whisky market.

We do work for a number of clients and they use our data to ensure they are selling at a fair price and/or buying at a fair price. We find the fairest way is to use our UK auction data as the “Open Market Value” or OMV and get the seller and buyer to “coalesce” around this value as a solid start point for negotiating a fair for all result!

Of course we don’t and can’t track all sales and we don’t focus on the primary retail market where brand owners and retailers are free to set the prices they choose. But what we can do is report on what the market – the buyers, be they connoisseurs, collectors or investors – choose to value these rare treasures!

Geography

Where in the world is best to go looking? Given the explosion in the UK auction market we understand that many of the bottles appearing in this channel are not just from the UK. Collections from UK, USA and Europe are being consigned to the most dynamic auction market in the world – the UK! We see more and more Japanese whiskies being consigned for sale too and many of these bottles come from Asia.

We are experiencing and enjoying a real shift in buyer behaviour and auctions are a critical part of this. In the UK we have seen the following Volume & Value explosion over recent years and there is little sign of it reversing, although we do sense a slow down in volume growth leading to a slowing of value growth for some brands/bottles.

The range, choice and availability of rare whisky at auction has never, ever been better. Happy treasure hunting!

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