The CRAZIEST auction in RM's history!

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Why do I need an armored car to go sell, you know, a special wishes Porsche in in Mexico City?

[00:00:14]So, Mexico City was one of like the first kind of really interesting farway uh car auctions that I got to take part in with RM Southern. And it was through a special wishes program with Porsche.

[00:00:24]And it was this really cool 718 that Patrick Dempsey had raced across the Panameana. Porsche approached us, you know, because it's a one of two car, because Patrick Dempsey had raced it, the value that they put on a car like this is pretty high. Two, three what like, you know, MSRP would be on a car like this. It was a cool opportunity for us to engage in Mexico City. Obviously, Porsche as a brand is like, you know, in the DNA of the enthusiast car world and in our DNA, too. So, of course, we wanted to do it. And so, we went back and forth a little bit like, where is it? What's going on? Mexico City turned out to be like a ranch 2 and a half hours outside of Mexico City. And still sounds like a great idea. Small team of us were going to go down. But ultimately they're like, "Great, don't worry about it. We're going to we're going to send a driver. He's going to be yours for the weekend. He's going to take you to your hotel. He's going to take you to the sale. We're going to do all these interesting things." And so I show up in Mexico City with like two other guys from RM out of the LA office. Get off the airplane, get through the airport.

[00:01:18]And sure enough, the driver's sitting right there and he's got, you know, a Cayenne. And I'm like, you know, great.

[00:01:22]You know, Porsche is doing this right.

[00:01:24]And I go and open the door of the Cayenne and it's, you know, it's two feet thick or whatever, 18 inches, whatever it is. And I'm like, "Oh, that's interesting. This is a really big Cayenne." And you get in and you when you close the door, you have to hammer on it and you realize real quick that you're sitting in an armored car, right?

[00:01:39]And I'm like, "Well, where, you know, it was safe, right? Like where where are we going?" Like, "Oh, it's perfectly safe.

[00:01:44]You don't have to worry about anything."

[00:01:46]I guess it gives you a sense of security getting into an armored car, but then it also makes you wonder like why do I need an armored car to go sell, you know, a special wishes Porsche in in Mexico City. You know, we get to the hotel, they let us get comfortable and stuff like that. And then you get into this car the next morning, the driver drives us literally 2 hours outside the city and you pull into this ranch and you know, you've got the guys with the little mirrors on the end of the stick, right? So they can kind of like go under the car and see what's going on in the armored cards. You start thinking like what, you know, what would they be looking for? What could possibly go wrong out here? And so you drive down this long kind of like big huge like dirt driveway out to this ranch. And as you're pulling in there's these fences and you realize real quick that in the fences are, you know, tigers and hippos and like all these wild exotic animals.

[00:02:34]And it's, you know, it's like nothing you've ever seen. It's like nothing I've experienced at least in like North America. like in the States when you go to a car event like Pebble or or you know, Scottsdale or something like that, it's very what to be expected. So then you get down there and it's just it's not that. And you know, you pull in next to these horse stables with these beautiful like well brushed cared for horses that are like trotting down. They take us out there and and the event itself was incredible. Like just the stable of cars, half the attendees of the event helicoptered in. So, you've just got this like, you know, uh, traffic control of helicopters coming in and out of the event the entire time we're there. But, we sell the car and the car does really, really well. Like, you know, it's just it it was an unbelievable thing. The delivery was amazing. The heritage was so cool. The tide of the Paname was cool. And so, we finished the event, like we finished the the actual auction and everybody's celebrating and doing all this stuff.

[00:03:26]And the owner of the ranch, who's an incredible collector of cars, was like, "Hey, we do this big party at the end."

[00:03:32]Like some of the people kind of like take off, but then like the core group stays. There's probably 150 people still there. And all of a sudden, you start hearing music, you know, coming from like down towards the stables. And then you hear some cars coming. And he comes down in a white count with the doors up.

[00:03:47]And this singer, this woman is sitting on the on the roof of the car in in just full cowboy garb. She's got spurs on her boots. and she comes out singing as he's blasting the count through, you know, this audience in this crowd. And it was like this nothing that I've, you know, ever seen you use a car like that for.

[00:04:07]But then the best part was it was a white car and she finishes and like the car drives away and you keep hearing you think it's the same car and then a black Countach comes kind of coming around the corner. She's sitting on the roof of that car too singing a new song, slides off the roof, gets on this like dancing horse. So, she's got this horse that's dancing and singing and you've got these cars that are like sliding behind her and it's just I think it speaks to like the whole enthusiast kind of car world, which is it's not normal. It's not cut from like any specific playbook. It's like you love what you love. You know what I mean? These guys love what they love. You're eccentric and fun and like, you know, it's just it was an absolute blast and like nothing that I've ever experienced. To sell a car like that, you need a global reach, right? Because if Porsche did it, they would sell it to someone probably within the Porsche network within Mexico. If another auction house did it, like a local Mexico based auction house, again, they're you're going to pull from like a very finite market. But what they wanted to do was find like a global audience for this car. Not just to buy the car, but to like pay attention to Porsche still has racing in their DNA, right?

[00:05:10]Porsche is still an incredible machine that you can go rip the Panameana in, but also, you know, your your dentist can drive it to work, right? So we were the right partner for that because of the global reach. Like RM Southernbees was founded 40 plus years ago by Rob Meyers in a little farm town in Canada.

[00:05:27]Sibies became a minority partner in the business a handful of years ago and then they became a majority partner in the business a few years after that. And what it immediately did is it gave RM the largest global footprint of any business with any auction house around the globe. We have offices in Canada, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, London, the UAE. We have a presence in, you know, Asia Pac and then down in Mexico.

[00:05:49]And what comes with that too though is this massive global audience, right?

[00:05:53]People that pay attention to us that immediately trust us because we are RM but we're also subies. So you've got this trust transfer that you know that if I buy something from you, if you tell me I should pay attention to you, I should pay attention, right? Because I trust the brand. So that's what Porsche wanted to do with this project. They approached us. We took it on. We've done some other similar projects with them in Europe and Canada and North America. We started marketing the car like all over the world, right? And we ended up with registered biders in Geneva, throughout Europe, the UK, Canada, US, Mexico. And for anybody who buys cars outside of America, especially, you know, the last couple years, it's a bit tricky to get them in, especially if they're a new car. It's next to impossible unless you're going to do show and display or something else. So, it was really hard to find a buyer outside of Mexico. But what it did do is it found a bunch of buyers within Mexico that Porsche wasn't privy to. So they these buyers knew about RM Southern. They paid attention to what we did. They paid attention to what Southern did in the market. And then we told them that hey this is something that you guys should pay attention to and super cool. And so they started paying attention to it. So we ended up with this massive global reach.

[00:07:00]We simoc cast the thing. So we sold it live. Like I was sitting up there on a microphone auctioning this car in front of a bunch of people. I don't speak Spanish and you know we're in the middle of Mexico and I'm auctioning it in English. They're all understanding.

[00:07:13]We're also live casting it on sealed and the sealed platform that we built for arms was something that you don't know what the actual price is, right? So like you don't know what the price is. You don't know if it sold. You don't know if it didn't sell. You just know the position that you're in, you know, between one and however many other biders there are participating. So it's just designed to incentivize like this complete privacy and protection both for the buyer and the seller. So like you can get something that you want really bad, but then you're protecting that car. So you don't know if it's sold. So if the buyer for some reason, you know, didn't get the number they wanted, they can pickle it, bring it back to market at some point. But if you do buy it, you don't have this artificial, you know, ceiling on future value because like everybody knows what you paid for it.

[00:07:52]And then in a country like Mexico where you don't want anyone to know anything that you paid for anything, it's better to be quiet about all of those transactions. It worked out really well.

[00:08:01]So even though we're auctioning it live, everybody was bidding on their phones and on computers like in the audience.

[00:08:06]And then around the world, we had people in Canada and America and Europe and the UK bidding on the car online as well.

[00:08:13]And then we had this massive, you know, LED screen behind us that was like showing the position of the bids and stuff. So they chose us because we could create that reach, right? And nobody else globally can create the reach that that we have. And it's actually interesting too because that event kind of spawned a bunch of other stuff that we did with Porsche. One of which that was really interesting was that after the LA wildfire, so this is, you know, flash forward what, two years, year and a half from the from the Panamera race, Porsche reached out and was like, "Hey, listen. We really want to do something for LA." And LA is the epicenter of that. Like the roads going into Malibu and and you know, up and throughout Northern California and the canyons all over the state are like next to none.

[00:08:52]And they said, "Hey, we want to give you guys an ST." Right? And this was at the time where like you couldn't get an ST. It was the last one they had. And they're like, we're just going to give it to you from dollar one. We want all of the funds to flow through the American Red Cross and to go to wildfire victims throughout Los Angeles. And we're like, cool, let's do this. So we did the same thing. We were like, we'll do sealed. We'll run the playbook back that we did at the this event in Mexico City. Then we were trying to figure out like how do we get legs on this thing?

[00:09:16]How do we get everyone to know? Because of course people will pay it attention because it's the right cause and it's a really cool freaking car. I reached out to Orlando Bloom and like he was just about to become the face of Porsche Design. It was like days away from the announcement and I was like, "Hey." I'm like, "You live in the area." At the time, he was just north of LA. And I'm like, "What if we had this car dropped off in your driveway and you talk about it? We talk about it together." And he's like, he's like, "No, don't even worry about it." He's like, "I'm going to come to you." And so he comes down to the office and he and I just walk around this car for, you know, 15 minutes just like talking about why it's cool. And then the connection that we both have to Los Angeles and to Porsche and all this cool stuff and it ended up selling for like a million or a million one right when the auction kind of fully came to fruition and it went to the right person. This guy's like a Porsche enthusiast. He followed RM the bees. So that's how we found the car. You know, we raised over a million dollars for the wildfire victims in Los Angeles. But like the story arc is exactly the same.

[00:10:14]Like people come to us because we have this reach. You can pull a celebrity in who happens to be also be like a passionate car enthusiast, but then we can, you know, reach people like all over the globe with these like really special stories that are curated in a way that I don't think anybody else can curate.

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