Supercar dealer: how to make (or lose) a million

Porsche 911 R - Prices are topping €500,000, but Fragopoulos says that will drop by €100,000 once the market takes on board that the new GT3 combines a naturally aspirated engine with both a manual ’box option and a possible ‘touring’ variant with no rear wing.

Fragopoulos is unusual among his fraternity for being free-talking and pulling few punches, but he’s also passionate about what he does. He distances himself from accusations of profiteering, pointing out that most of the cars he sells he never owns. “The owner is taking 90-95% of the profit, as they should,” he says. “My role is in making and facilitating the deals. Believe me, there are kids out there trying to make €50,000 on every car sale but that just isn’t realistic – or if that is the profit margin, then the hassle involved is off the scale. The internet has ended those days forever, because buyers can look up what a car is worth at the click of a button. They’re smarter and so the brokers need to be, too.”

Contacts, says Fragopoulos, are key, and he doesn’t sugar-coat the world he works in. “You need a client database, a contacts book and good stock,” he says. “That’s simpler to say than do, especially in a world sometimes inhabited by sharks. Some of the tricks people play are unreal – and that’s people with long-standing reputations as often as new kids. It’s astounding how greedy some people are, both owners and dealers.

“That’s the flipside of the internet: while prices are more publicly available, it’s also easy to find examples of inflated prices, and people don’t like to think that they’ve undersold or overbought. It is not a market that is terribly well grounded in reality. I work with rich, clever people – I won’t overpay or overcharge, or apply big margins – but because I have contacts in the US, Europe and Russia, I know where to find the right people and can make money because I sell cars every week, not every few months.”

Inevitably, Fragopoulos sees his business from angles that suit him, but even he admits to some heartache over seeing cars bought as investments. “That’s the majority of business, if I’m honest,” he says. “It’s a fact that if you put miles on a car, then you dent its value. You can own, drive and make money, but it will always be worth less if you’ve driven it. I’ve got one client with about €70m worth of Porsches and Ferraris – a 959 S, a 288 GTO, a 599, you name it – all of them the lowestmileage examples in the world. He’s got a team of people looking after them all, but they’ve never turned a wheel. His money, his cars, his choice.”

Bugatti Chiron - With early customer deliveries coming on stream and the waiting list stretching to years, the current premium for the must-have hypercar is €1m over list price if you want it by May, or €750,000 if you can wait until September.