Delaware License Plate Purchased For $675K

Here's something REALLY crazy, it's a Delaware thing!

Clark

Rare license plate sells for $675,000

By ROBIN BROWN • GANNETT NEWS SERVICE • February 18, 2008

Cheers and applause filled the packed Rehobeth Beach, Del., convention center as Tim Ayers of Seaford bid $625,000 for the coveted No. 6 black-and-white Delaware license plate.

As anticipation, then bidding grew more spirited, so did the noise.

Over the boom, 25-year-old Frank Vassallo IV of Wilmington, who had bid $625,000 moments earlier, yelled into his cell phone to his grandfather in California. He reported that they had the high bid at $625,000.

Auctioneer Butch Emmert, realizing he had two bids for the same amount, returned to Vassallo to ask if he was in for $650,000.

Vassallo's hand trembled slightly on his cell phone as he repeated the question and then nodded to Emmert, then hollered to his grandfather.

"We're at $650,000 and we're the high bid."

Then Emmert worked on Ayers, who owns the Sussex Guide, likening the plate to the Mona Lisa, saying, "Anything worth $650,000 is worth $700,000."

Amid the ruckus, Sheri Klemkowski of Rehoboth Beach smiled serenely like a model, showing off the plate, in a Delaware-style "Deal or No Deal."

Cheers and shouts of "Go for it!" grew.

Then Emmert, after more banter, said a "third and final call" at $650,000 - and Ayers raised by $10,000.

"Six-sixty!"

"Six-seventy-five?" he asked Vassallo, sparking more roar, then all eyes were on the young man with the cell phone.

"Six-seventy-five," he told Emmert calmly. "

"It's a world record!" Emmert proclaimed. "Six-seventy five!"

Then Emmert again courted Ayers, sharing a report of a license plate with the No. 1 from Abu Dhabi that sold over the weekend for $14 million in the United Arab Emirates.

"Come on, Tim!" someone yelled.

Going once, going twice, a third and final call at $675,000. Then Emmert asked Ayers to raise to $685,000, saying, "What is $10,000 on this?"

But Ayers shook his head as Emmert repeated, "Going once at $675,000, going twice."

"Third and final call," he said over cheers. Then finally, "Sold!"

Vassallo beamed, yelling into the phone, "We got it at six-seventy-five."

He was swarmed like a buzzer-beating hero, but he turned to the people behind him, relatives of the tag's previous owner, Charles Murphy, a prominent Milford resident who died in November at age 87.

"Congratulations," his son John, also of Milford, told Vassallo, extending his hand.

"Thank you very much," Vassallo said, adding, "I just wish my grandfather could be here."

Despite the cross-country bidding, he said, "the plate will stay in Delaware."

Delaware's motor vehicle laws allow registration numbers and tags to be transferred between cars and owners, triggering the uniquely Delaware obsession with low-digit tags: Family members pass the tags along in their wills, and there are Web sites brokering the buying and selling of the tags.

Put more simply, it's a status symbol, said Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University in New York.

With Nos. 1, 2, and 3 reserved for the governor, lieutenant governor and secretary of state, the single digit tags become that much more elusive.

"You've got a supply of virtually none, so it's the status that naturally comes with having something that's hard to get," Thompson said. "The very fact that they're buyable and sellable is what gives them their value."

Vassallo's grandfather is Anthony Fusco of Wilmington, the owner of Fusco Management, a development company that has worked on projects such as the College Square Shopping Center in Newark. Fusco is wintering in California and will decide what car wears the tag, Vassallo said.

"Everyone in the family has them," he said. "It's a family thing. It's a Delaware thing.

"We develop in Delaware and it will stay in Delaware and in our family and the company."

The same family bought No. 9 for $185,000 at a 1993 auction by Emmert, with an annual appreciation coming out to about 7 percent, said Vassallo, who drives No. 27.

Vassallo said his family had no set amount in mind.

"We did it all off the fly with no number," he said. "We didn't have any set price, more than five hundred (thousand) and less than a million."

 

I thought California Black plates were expensive at $500.
California yellow plates are a bit highter.

The California Blue plates are not tradable. Apparently the state doesn't consider them important yet. (defined as = not enough money to be made.)

 

I collect license plates, but can't ever fathom paying $675K for a license plate...even if I could use it on the car. For that amount of money, I'd be afraid someone would steal the plates right off the car, even the front plate ought to be worth something...

Here in Oregon, we, too, can take plates off of one car and put them on another. But if the plates aren't being issued anymore, then you can't. Our old blue/yellow and yellow/blue plates (pre-1987), and our "Oregon Trail" plates are still being revalidated, but they aren't being issued anymore, so there's limits to transferring them now. My understanding is that the Trail plates can be taken off of your old car and put on your new one if trading the old one in (because they were extra-cost plates), but you can't just move them from one car to another. And I believe that the blue/yellow and yellow/blue plates have to stay on the car that they are currently on, or they become unusable, even if you're trading in the car with the old plates, they can't be reused on another car. Because of this, our old plates don't have any value, except to collectors (and then, only little value).

Usually, people won't take the standard "tree" plates from one car to the other...they leave them with the car (in general, the plates belong to the car). But any plate you have to pay extra for (personalized plates, "Salmon", "Crater Lake" or "Cultural Trust" graphic plates or any "group" plates) are considered yours to take with you if you want. If you don't take the plates with you, they stay with the car and the next owner can keep them if they want (and some types of plates have to be paid extra for at each/every renewal) or they can turn them in and put tree plates on their car. The only people I see taking their plates with them are those with personalized plates or those with low-number graphic plates. I have transferred my Crater Lake plates through 4 cars now, but only because it is a 3,000 series plate out of 160,000 plates that have been issued up to this point (the word is that once 200,000 of them have been issued, they won't be issued any longer).

Good thing this subject came up...my car is up for registration renewal this year and I have to get it done soon...good reminder .

 

it killed me to pay 50bux for a mint pair of 1963 plates!!!!!!!!!!!!!

...almost 700 G's for a plate???.....thats retarded!!!

 

It's nice to see the price of vanity going up to idiot values!

 

How about the expensive single digit arib ones that sold for over or close to a million!

 

I would imagine any single digit plate in any state would be worth big bucks if it's active.

Here in Delaware even three digit plates go for big money too.

You can have a special plate made by a authorized maker here and the DMV has to authorize it first before you can use it.

The special plates are quite smaller & they're all black with white letters. It's a real vanity thing here because the state is so small and the numbers don't have to get so high.

Clark

 

Lol

What about a plate having 666...