Time for a story.
I have a client who’s been wanting a Ducati 750 F1 Montjuich for some time, so I always drop him a line when I encounter one worth pursuing. A few weeks back, someone in another country reached out to me as he had an example with a whopping 7 kilometers on the odometer for sale. Pretty impressive!
The seller and I exchanged a few emails and he was very nice, but things slowed down when it came down to pricing. I have a pet peeve about this kind of thing – I believe that if you’re selling something, you should have an asking price. I do not like when sellers ask me to have a client make an offer or suggest what a fair number would be, so it was Strike 1 for me when the seller did just that. I let it sit for a bit and a few days later he sent over some additional photos, so I leaned on him again for an asking price.
Part of his email response included a ‘list of sales he downloaded,’ which I though was great because I was having difficutly finding comps for a low-mile Montjuich. And he very fairly wrapped up the message with, “End of the day only worth what someone will pay for it aye.” Can’t argue with that!
Here was his list:
The wording was a bit awkward so I felt like this was a list generated by AI and I decided to look these up. Here’s what I found:
1. 2024 Bonhams Las Vegas Near-original, 3,800 mi $46,000
Bonhams hasn’t had an auction in Vegas for several years (I believe the last one was in 2020). I assume AI was referring to this bike that Bonhams sold in the UK in 2024 with ~3,800 miles on it, but it went for £18,400 including the buyer’s fee (roughly $25k USD)
So we’re 0 for 1.
2. 2023 Bring a Trailer (US) Restored, 7,200 mi $40,500
Bring a Trailer has never sold a Montjuich before. They’ve sold some F1 750s but everything has been between $11k-$18k. If you click this link and scroll to “Ducati Auction Results” you can see every Ducati they’ve ever sold, I sorted it from highest price to lowest and the only Ducati they’ve ever sold for exactly $40,500 is a Desmosedici earlier this year:
0 for 2.
3. 2023 Bonhams UK Original, 5,000 mi £33,350 (~$42,000)
I tried for a while but I simply could not find this (or anything related) on the Bonhams site.
0 for 3.
4. 2022 Mecum Las Vegas Low-mileage, unrestored $48,400
Here’s every Ducati that Mecum offered at the 2022 Las Vegas auction. There’s no Montjuichs. In the entire auction there was only one bike that sold for $48,400, which was a 1916 Indian Hedstrom Powerplus.
0 for 4.
5. 2021 Bonhams UK Original paint, 6,000 mi £28,750 (~$39,500)
Same as #3.
0 for 5.
6. 2021 Collecting Cars UK Restored £26,000 (~$35,500)
Collecting Cars doesn’t show any Montjuichs in their sold history. They’ve sold four 750 F1s, one of which was a Santamonica.
0 for 6.
I was shocked and frustrated – not with the seller but with the absolute uselessness of the AI results. It would be easy for a novice to take these values as gospel but every single one was basically made up. Plus it missed one of the easier to locate searches for a recent sale, which was one that sold at Gooding for $17,600 in December 2023, one of my clients bought this and it went to Canada.
Please understand – this is not my way of saying AI is always wrong (or that I’m always right). I was just so blown away by the inaccuracy of a tool that people are relying on that I wanted to share this experience. It’s crazy to me that people are letting this nonsense think for themselves. Even more concering is that at the end of the day, motorcycling isn’t a very serious thing and people who deal with much more “important” things who are poorly relying on this, too.
So please, think for yourself (or at least double check what you’re searching for)…and as every mediocre rant should end: get off my lawn!