I greatly enjoy my annual trip to Arizona each January to cover the goings-on of the Scottsdale auctions. This year, with the addition of a new sale by Gooding & Co., the middle of three consecutive weekends of auction action presented five sales essentially going head-to-head. For someone like myself who on scene to report on these auctions, it's enough to make one's head spin! These five auctions are bookended by the ICA auction the weekend prior and the Kruse International sale the weekend following. Trying to navigate the Scottsdale/Phoenix traffic on this crowded week filled with locals, auction-goers and snowbirds makes it difficult to get to all the sales, but my co-worker, Meredyth Albright (her first Arizona auction experience) and I did pretty good at getting most everywhere we'd planned to go. We even got to watch the second half of our beloved Green Bay Packers loss to the New York Giants in the NFC Championship game at a Scottsdale sports bar (I'll get over it by summer).

    I always fly out a day prior to the auctions to squeeze in a salvage yard story (found a great one in far eastern Arizona), and make it a point to take in the early morning activities of the all-Saturday McDonald's car show on Indian Bend Road in Scottsdale. It's a don't miss event if you eat/sleep/breathe collector vehicles like I do. I find partaking in these non-auction related things keeps me from overdosing on the money end of the old car hobby, which a week's worth of sitting at auctions can easily do if you're not careful.

    Speaking of the money end, I heard from one seller at the Barrett-Jackson sale that he felt the 2008 auction was definitely "a buyer's market." The muscle cars that in the past few Arizona auctions were bringing jaw-dropping money seemed to have cooled a bit. If I had to put an early percentage drop on what early analysis I've been able to perform on my results, I'd say many of the muscle cars were bringing 30 percent fewer dollars overall in 2008 (that's a rough, general calculation at this point). With so many car enthusiasts looking to these early Arizona sales as being the barometer of what will play out in 2008 as far as collector vehicle values, it will be interesting to see if, indeed, muscle car lovers can take advantage of lowered values to acquire some of their dream cars that even one year ago might have been a financial pipe dream.