Mike Hall is looking to sell his five-acre property in Tappen, B.C., and he’s willing to throw in something extra to sweeten the deal: 340-plus vintage cars.
Hall plans on retiring, and in an effort to simplify his life, wants to sell his auto-wrecking business — along with the hundreds of classic cars he never found time to restore.
“I’m still in good health,” he said. “If they can go to a good home and I could walk away, it would make my life a whole lot simpler.
“I used to think that my whole dream would be to retire and restore cars. Well, I’d have to live to be 200 to restore all the cars I’ve got.”
The property — located about 10 minutes from Salmon Arm in B.C.’s Shuswap region — includes “a 900-square-foot restoration shop, a 1,200-square-foot steel building and enough steel beams and rafters to build 8,000 square feet of covered space,” according to the real-estate listing.
The asking price: $1.45 million.
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“People say $1.4 million is a lot of money,” Hall said. “Not when a condo in Vancouver is going for $2 million.”
Hall said his realtor has fielded about 100 inquiries — including five or six he considered to be serious — but he won’t start counting his money until a solid offer is on the table.
“Buyers are liars, as my buddy used to say. Show me the money.”
He said he would love to sell to someone “who can do mechanical and body work, because if you can do all the work in-house and not pay anybody, then there’s a lot of money to be made.”
Hall’s car collection consists almost entirely of vintage two-door vehicles that run the gamut from 1940s trucks to old-school ’70s muscle cars. Highlights include a 1927 Ford Model T truck, a 1947 Mercury Ute from Australia, and a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu convertible. Perhaps the rarest vehicle in his collection is a 1966 Pontiac Beaumont, one of only 45 ever made.
“It’s pretty hard to accumulate a pile like this anymore, because they’re all gone,” Hall said.
Hall spent decades scaling rocks for a living and collecting cars was a labour of love. But now he says it’s time to move on.
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“You think you own sh–t, and you realize it owns you,” he said.
“Everything you own attaches a spider web to you, and one day you’ve got so many spider webs you can’t move and you can’t breathe.”
That may not sound like much of a sales pitch, but Hall says his offer is ideal for a gearhead who wants nothing more than to work on cars and enjoy the quiet beauty of the south-central British Columbia.
“If you come up here, you’ve got a lifetime worth of work and you’re only five minutes from Shuswap Lake,” he said.
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