Porsche to clamp down on profiteers

Profiteers beware: Porsche is watching.

The German manufacturer and its Australian operation have sounded a strong warning to prospective buyers looking to make a quick buck out of an upcoming limited-edition purchase.

Following a string of recent examples, like the guy who tried flipping his new 911 R for three times its purchase price ($1.2 million), stakeholders are clamping down.

Paul Ellis, spokesman for Porsche Cars Australia, said that purchasing a Porsche for “commercial reasons” goes against the spirit of the company.

As such, Ellis said that Porsche would closely monitor the buying motives of prospective customers on cars including the 911 GT3 and 911 GT2 RS, which are likely to be strictly limited in build numbers.

“We always try and give those cars to the right customers,” Ellis said.

“We’re even more mindful to make sure that we keep that pretty tight. We build those cars to be driven and enjoyed, not to be flipped for a quick profit.

“That goes against the very spirit of our company and the very reason that we build those cars. We’re an engineering company that loves to build top of the range and exciting performance cars, we’re not a marketing company.”

Porsche, along with the likes of Ferrari, is in a unique position with some of its limited-edition 911 models in that it gets to pick the customers who buy its cars.

After an expression of interest process, successful customers are usually chosen based on their previous Porsche ownership history, along with buying motives.

“For us it’s important that we sell those carefully-crafted, intelligently-built, performance-oriented, over-engineered sports car thoroughbred machinery to people that want exactly that. They want the DNA of the brand,” Ellis said.

“For us it becomes annoying when we see those cars used as a commercial asset that someone’s trying to make money on. That’s not why build cars.

“We’re careful in many ways that we try to give those cars to the right customer. They drive the car and if they want to sell the car after five or 10 years, good on them. But to turn them around quickly while the paint’s still wet on the car, that’s not how we go about our thinking and why we build our cars.”

Ellis said Porsche Australia was unlikely to force customers into signing a waiver declaring they would not flip their cars within a certain period. Instead, he hopes the company’s internal measures can separate good from bad.

“We value our relationships with customers,” he said. “If you’ve a really loyal customer that has bought three or four GT 911 cars in the past and they’ve always done the right thing, I think they might find it offensive being asked to sign something.”

Instances of profiteering have become more prevalent in recent years, and Ellis said that the trend was hardly isolated to Australia.

“It’s a global thing. Some of the people a lot more senior than myself at the company have been quite firm about what should happen to those customers,” he said.

“We have to be careful about what we say but it disappoints us. It disappoints us because you’re not showing your loyalty to the brand if you do that.

“We don’t want use of the word blacklisted and that’s not a word I’d like to use. But [profiteering] is something that we need to take into consideration.

“If we can identify earlier what a customer’s intentions may be, then maybe we can take that into consideration when we do our allocation. At the end of the day it’s up to our dealers with a bit of guidance from Porsche Cars Australia.”