Evan Halliday of RS Autohaus on Bring a Trailer, Porsches, and Selling Cars Where They Live

Evan Halliday co-founded RS Autohaus, an Atlanta company that consigns collector cars and sells them at auction, mostly on Bring a Trailer. When he sat down for Throttlecast, RS Autohaus was about six months old. Evan was not new to any of it. He has worked in the car business since 2012, first running a supercar driving experience at Atlanta Motorsports Park and later selling blue-chip Porsches and Ferraris at Merit Partners.

Grant Brewer and Dave Codrea talked with him at The Ride Lounge about how RS Autohaus works, what he learned renting out Ferraris by the lap, and how he would build a collection in today’s market.

Roswell, a McLaren F1, and a job at 14

Evan grew up in Roswell, Georgia, and still lives there. He is 36, married, and has two boys. Nobody else in his family cares about cars. He and his friends did, and his first job, at 14, was at a classic car dealer in Roswell.

The moment that settled it came earlier. On a family trip to London when he was about 12, he walked past the McLaren dealership and saw a McLaren F1 behind the glass. There is still a photo of him standing in front of it. “Once I saw a McLaren F1 in person, it was done.” It is still his favorite car. The car that first pulled him in, though, was a Gen II Dodge Viper owned by a neighbor.

Velocity Motorsports: $300 for three laps

After graduating from Clemson, Evan joined a startup in Buckhead run by car guys. He had seen Exotics Racing, a supercar driving experience in Las Vegas, and nothing like it existed on this coast. Atlanta Motorsports Park was still being paved. He pitched the idea to his bosses, who agreed to invest, and then to AMP owner Jeremy Porter, who said yes. Velocity Motorsports opened in 2012.

It started with two cars, a 991 Carrera S and a Ferrari F430, nicknamed Ketchup and Mustard for their red and yellow paint. By the time Evan sold the company about two and a half years later, the fleet was 11 cars, including a Nissan GT-R, a Lamborghini Gallardo Balboni, and a McLaren MP4-12C.

The pitch sold itself: three laps in a Ferrari on a racetrack. Everybody said yes. Finding those people was harder in the years before anyone knew how to market on Instagram. Groupon got them off the ground. Corporate events became the steady business. Evan charged $300 for three laps. The Porsche Experience Center now puts people in a GT4 for up to two hours for about $700, and he’s glad he never had to compete with that.

Several Velocity customers are still close friends, and some still buy and sell cars through him.

Corporate life, then Merit Partners

After Velocity, Evan spent three years in a corporate job at Home Depot. He calls it a great company and says he learned a lot there. He also learned that corporate life was not for him. He would spot a client’s problem, pass it up the chain, and watch nothing happen.

In 2019 he joined Merit Partners, which specializes in Porsche and Ferrari. Its CEO, Burt, had been VP of sales at Velocity and officiated Evan’s wedding. Evan was the fourth employee. He sold cars and made review videos, which put him behind the wheel of an Enzo, a Carrera GT, and a 918. The drive he remembers most was a full week in a 911 R during Monterey Car Week, on the coast and far from the usual two-minute demo route.

Merit taught him the detail work. In high-end sales, he says, “you can’t just wing it.” The Porsche world is especially nuanced: air-cooled or water-cooled, manual or PDK, and a long list of things to check on each. Mistakes will happen. What matters is how you make them right with the client.

How RS Autohaus works

Evan and his business partner, Cody, met at Merit. Cody ran marketing and YouTube. Evan ran sales. Together they helped Merit sell cars on Bring a Trailer and watched the site go from a joke about its own name to, in Evan’s words, “honestly the king.”

RS Autohaus is built on two things. The first is auctions. The second is that they go to the client. Many competitors require you to ship the car to them, which makes sense because they can control it. RS Autohaus gathers the real condition of the car remotely, lines up anything that needs doing, and then flies out to the owner’s home or storage facility to shoot photos and video and list it. Usually there’s a lunch or a dinner in there too.

“I want them to picture getting taken care of,” Evan says. He thinks the “we’re about relationships” line is overplayed, and the cars matter. He just doesn’t want a sale to feel like a transaction.

Every car goes through a check-in process before photography, so it is represented as well as it can be. His advice to anyone selling on Bring a Trailer: you will not like the first reserve they suggest. Only once has BaT approved an RS Autohaus reserve as submitted. Make a clear case for your number and you can usually land around 5% above trade value. He sees the appeal of no-reserve auctions, but so far every car they have run has had a reserve.

The name is half Porsche, half honesty. RS is the badge Porsche puts on its best cars, and that’s what they wanted the brand tied to. “Autohaus” came from ChatGPT.

Building a collection with less emotion

Evan says the market changed around 2021 and 2022. Collectors used to expect only blue-chip cars like the F40 and F50 to climb. When the 911 GT3 RS 4.0 was new, owners took theirs to the track. Now he estimates 80% of buyers want to watch their cars go up in value.

His advice for someone starting a collection now:

• Be honest about where you are. If this is your first go, start with Porsche. The market is consistent and always there. Ferrari is great too, but the buy-in and the upkeep are on another level.
• Take some emotion out of it. He has watched collectors go all in on one idea, like a garage of Mopar Demons and Redeyes that never went to the moon.
• Buy what the market rewards. You might prefer the look of a Ferrari 599, but the GT3 RS 4.0 went from $750,000 to a million.
• Keep a few cars just for you. Childhood dream cars have a place. “If you use emotion for everything, you could end up with a pretty sore collection.”

The quiet days are the hard ones

The hardest days at RS Autohaus aren’t the busy ones. They’re the days with no live auction and a phone that isn’t ringing. Evan and Cody spend them working out how to reach the next seller and explain what they do.

They work out of a 1,600-square-foot space, and they haven’t settled the long-term plan. One option is small branches in other cities. The other is keeping it just the two of them, because they like flying to clients, meeting their families, and hearing the story behind each car.

Rapid fire

• Dream three-car garage: McLaren F1, 997.2 GT2 RS, Aston Martin Valour.
• Favorite track: Barber. Favorite roads: Highway 1 for the scenery, the Tail of the Dragon for the craziness.
• Manual or paddles: manual.
• Most underrated car he’s driven: the Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series. He expected a cushy Mercedes and got a missile.
• Trend he wants gone: obnoxiously loud exhaust. A straight-piped Carrera GT, he says, is just too much.

Watch the full episode

The full conversation with Evan Halliday is above and on YouTube. Find RS Autohaus at rsautohaus.com or on Instagram.

RS Autohaus often meets clients where the car is stored, “in a place like this,” as Evan put it on set. The Ride Lounge is a car club in Atlanta with climate-controlled car storage in Peachtree Corners and Midtown, so when a buyer, a photographer, or the owner shows up, the car is clean, charged, and ready. See how membership works.