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License Plates at Auction: Still a Wild Market in Delaware

by David Hewett

Seven years ago we told you about William "Butch" Emmert of Emmert Auction Associates, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, an auctioneer whose specialty is selling non-antique license plates for what outsiders consider to be outlandish sums. At the time of that report (December 1999), Emmert had gaveled down a one-digit license plate for $185,000, which was considered a record price at the time.

It's the prestige of having a low-digit plate that fuels the market in the First State. They are a not very subtle way of letting the less fortunate know that the auto owner has money, clout, or both. The demand for low-digit plates has also attracted a few hardy souls who look to buy low and sell high quickly.

Some general rules apply to Delaware license plates. To have any resale value, the plates must be "live," that is, they have to come from an actively registered motor vehicle. Straight swaps are out. Both seller and buyer have to appear at the Division of Motor Vehicles, fill out the required paperwork, and pay a $20 fee.

If you don't like the color of your plates, you can get black-and-white porcelain (baked enamel) plates from a private vendor, but they still have to go through the registration process described above.

Letter prefixes used to indicate the class of vehicle that carried the plates. "C" tags used to be issued only to pickup trucks, "PC" to station wagons, and numerical tags to passenger cars. Those rules no longer apply, and all plates can now be used interchangeably.

Lately there have been rumors that the former record had been surpassed. On February 27 we asked Butch Emmert to fill us in. Once started, Butch Emmert is a difficult man to stop, so we'll let him tell us, in his own words, about what's happening with Delaware license plates.

"I recently sold a two-digit plate for $225,000, with no buyer's premium for that plate. Then I sold number 900 this past weekend for $85,000, plus ten percent. And in the spring I sold [number] 303 for $116,000, plus ten." Emmert later said the record sale had occurred "about three months ago."

We asked if any ballpark figures applied to the value of license plates.

"The rule of thumb now is three digits bring $50,000-plus. Two digits bring in the $200,000 range. I had the previous record, a number nine I sold ten years ago, for $185,000, plus ten [percent]. I sell a $100,000 plate just about every auction. I sold $200,000 worth of plates last weekend. I sold one privately and three at auction then. I sell both privately and at auction.

"You've got to understand that the tag phenomenon in Delaware really came to pass from 1955 on. It got to the point where in the mid-1950's three digits weren't worth a lot of money—they might have been worth a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars apiece—but two digits were worth four or five thousand dollars even back then. And then they just appreciated exponentially since then. I sell sixty to one hundred [plates] a year.

"You know the interesting phenomenon where a high tide floats all boats? You've heard that? You know, it has pulled the low-end tags up. If you knew someone in Motor Vehicles, we used to get four-digit tags for little or nothing, or buy them from dealers for a thousand dollars.

"Well, there's tags that ten years ago were a thousand and two thousand dollars and are now twelve and thirteen thousand dollars for four-digit tags, and the high-end four-digit tags are now fifteen to seventeen thousand.

"Consequently, now the PC tag that was a passenger carrier, that was a station wagon designation way back when, and it could only be on station wagons, then after that it could only be on station wagons and SUVs. Now they've just leveled the playing field, and a PC tag can be on anything. We've seen three-digit PC tags go from two thousand to ten to fifteen thousand. And C tags the same way. C tags were commercial tags, you know, for commercial vehicles. You can put them on just about anything now too, and we've seen them go up fourfold in ten years, all the way across the board."

Is the Holy Grail plate of all plates out there somewhere?

"The grand one is anything in the single digits. My feeling is that anything in the single digits is worth-well, there's only two or three held privately, like five and seven. The governor has [number] one, the lieutenant governor has two, then the secretary of state has number three, but there are some families that have single-digit tags. Charles Murphy is one, from Milford, Delaware. He's the one that I sold number nine for. He has number eight too. Anything, five, six, seven, or eight, any single digit I would say is not worth less than $400,000.

"I think it's safe to say I could sell any of them for $400,000 tomorrow."