BMW 5 Series Ultimate Buyers Guide: Should You Buy an E28 5 Series?

[HayekFan]

Just bumped into this on YouTube and thought it might be of interest here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDENataq31E

About 45 minutes long and covers quite a bit of ground. It was posted about a year ago, so fairly recently. They get into current E28 market value including the recent upswing which is apparent at places like BaT. The interviewee owns a shop in Colorado that works on classic BMWs. He also buys E28s to restore and sell and seems to have a good sense of the market.

[mgambuzza]

Just saw this the other day. Great video and wish more INDY shops were closer to me (closest good one in Syracuse - that I know of).

[HayekFan]

What stood out for me is he said a 535i is worth $12k to $15k these days. That's for a well kept example but I don't think he meant a total creampuff, and he didn't mean an IS model or a euro. He just meant a solid regular 535i with the diving board bumpers.

RE the local shop -- I know what you mean. I recently relocated and had been looking for a good indy euro car shop only to strike out. The two shops I was aware of refused to work on anything more than 20 years old. Then I got a lead on a newish place one town over. They also were hesitant to work on my car at first, but after talking with them some more I think they realized that I wasn't inflicting some junker vehicle on them and that I wasn't going to flake out on them. They're going to do a power steering bracket repair for me next week and if that goes well I'll have some other stuff for them to do too.

[stuartinmn]

^ Many of the techs these days weren't born yet when our cars were built. Another thing the shops are wary of is if they get your car torn apart and then find out the replacement parts will take weeks for delivery or are NLA. It's understandable, if they have a work bay tied up with a car sitting there waiting for parts it's not generating income. Fortunately my local indy shop has a couple techs who really like working on the older BMWs so that helps a lot.

[HayekFan]

Yep, that's true and I don't blame them. Before I relocated to TN I was using a shop whose co-owner was a tech at a BMW dealership back in the eighties. He would work on the older cars himself and did great work. When he retired a few years ago they adopted a policy of no older cars except on a limited case by case basis. When I was talking with the shops around here, one of them said they quit dealing with older cars after too many times of a job starting as a straightforward repair and then growing into an adventure with NLA parts and all that. My impression was that that in itself wasn't the problem per se but was more about the owners not adjusting their expectations to accommodate the difficulties. And so it wound up not being worth the trouble to them.