Sharing the love Fractional ownership

Fractional ownership is all the rage in the classic car world – and other alternative investment markets – but what is it and how does it work? Paul Griffin investigates

Photography Sam Chick

WE’VE ALL IMAGINED it: part-owning a Ferrari GTO and blasting down to the coast on our allocated weekend with the car (when it will be street-parked outside our house, naturally). While that can happen to a lesser degree – and we’ll explore your options later – at the hard end of fractional investment in classic cars the benefits are usually a little less tangible. Of course, you will get to casually drop your part-ownership into conversation at every opportunity, and you may even get to gaze at your investment – some groups hold special gatherings for investors, or take them to events – but it’s unlikely that you’ll be driving it down to the local pub any more than the kids of someone with a share in a racehorse will be riding Dobbin at the local gymkhana.

Think of it more as a market-smart investment in a great work of art, with the benefit of a potential return on your outlay. It’s fair to say that fractional ownership won’t suit everybody, and for good reason you will see warnings that the value of investments can go down as well as up. However, the motivating factors are usually simple: returns from the classic car market have been very strong over the past decades, against gold, the FTSE, the housing market and especially against the banks. So if you are going to invest in anything, why not make it something you love? This way of thinking has in some cases nurtured the growth of communities around the investments, elevating the experience way above that of a mere financial transaction.

Fractional ownership is not a new phenomenon; it has been associated particularly with private jet and property ownership for many years, but it is more recently that classic cars have seen interest in part-ownership develop. Rally first offered a car for fractional ownership in the USA in 2016 and the largest community in the UK is currently TheCarCrowd, which first offered a Peugeot 205 GTI on its platform in 2021. More recently, many new ventures, each with a slightly different business model, have entered the market, creating a surge in interest and options.