Collectible Car Insurer Hagerty Eyes Off Australian Expansion

The Shannons stranglehold on the Australian insurance coverage marketplace for uncommon, costly and collectible automobiles might be nearing an finish, with America’s Hagerty Insurance coverage eying up the Australasian market.
Talking in the course of the Concorso d’Eleganza on Lake Como, Hagerty CEO McKeel Hagerty admitted his firm had been approached to enter the market there.
“There are a big quantity of people that need us to enter Australia,” Hagerty admitted.
“These requests have come from different insurance coverage corporations and the one drawback is the useful resource it might take us to do.
“However Australia can be a spot we ultimately get to, I feel.”
Any transfer into the Australian market would tread instantly on the toes of Shannons Insurance coverage enterprise, with each corporations specializing within the car-enthusiast and collector enterprise, relatively than mainstream automotive insurance coverage.

It’s a distinct segment, with automobiles usually appreciating in worth, with spare components generally extremely tough or unimaginable to supply and with valuers needing an encyclopedic information of one-off automobiles from even a century in the past.

Conventional insurance coverage corporations want enterprise fashions they’re extra accustomed to, and infrequently strategy corporations like Hagerty and Shannons to deal with collectible automobiles for his or her shoppers, Hagerty stated.
“The large insurance coverage corporations consider themselves as malls and must promote all the pieces, however we’re a boutique and never a division retailer,” Hagerty stated.
“9 out of the ten greatest insurance coverage corporations within the US companion with us. They’re the fiercest rivals and so they all have agreements with us.
“The straightforward cause is that 2% to three% of their common insurance policies would come with a automotive that we might be enthusiastic about, and so they don’t know what to do with it.
“The entire mannequin of insurance coverage is to deal with depreciating property and we solely cope with appreciating property, so we take an issue away from them and so they can preserve insuring the automobiles and homes and buildings they know learn how to do.”

Hagerty has been making different strikes, too, together with poaching AT&T advertising and marketing wizard Marc Burns for its newly created Senior Vice-President of Model and Advertising position, and it has a robust monitor file of beating monetary forecasts.

In contrast to Shannons, Hagerty runs a rising auctions enterprise, with the Broad Arrow public sale home promoting greater than €31 million in gross sales, with a 78% clearance fee, at its current Concorso d’Eleganza sale.
Shannons ran Australia’s most fascinating automotive auctions for greater than 40 years, however shuttered its Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne showrooms in 2023 after being absorbed by Suncorp.
Shannons, based by Bob Shannon greater than 40 years in the past, was absorbed by its long-term company companion, Royal & Solar Alliance Insurance coverage Restricted, in 2000, and has extra lately fallen below the Suncorp umbrella.
A protracted-time favourite of the Australian collectible-car scene, Shannons additionally helps greater than 1,200 automotive and motorbike occasions a yr in Australia, and runs the Shannons Membership, which it claims is Australia’s largest on-line motoring fanatic group.
Hagerty does comparable issues largely within the USA, the UK and Canada, starting from the very best of the excessive finish occasions at Concorso d’Eleganza on the Lodge Villa d’Este on Lake Como and the Pebble Seashore Concours d’Magnificence, to Radwood, Automobiles and Caffeine and the British Competition of the Unexceptional.
Its Drivers Membership journal is without doubt one of the biggest-circulation automotive magazines on the planet.