So, I have a *lot* of thoughts on this subject. For the past four years I've been systematically mining every aircraft sale listing on Controller and Trade-A-Plane, and I've built up a huge amount of supporting data / data enrichments / predictive models around that dataset. The bulk of that work goes to supporting
aircraftlookup.com and
TAP Deals, but I also have written some stuff about this on a blog that runs alongside these tools.
The first relevant post here is
"Is This the Peak Price for Aviation?" - it looks like available inventory has been climbing super fast in the past few months - we're seeing more aircraft hitting the market than any other time I've been recording data. I have to think that that's going to have an effect of driving prices down, not to mention gas climbing, interest rates biting into folks' abilities to pull loans on aircraft, recession fears, inflation, etc.
Second, I wrote something up just this week that looks at how you could come up with a
consumer price index of sorts for general aviation sales. In that post, I show that in 2018-2021, aircraft prices mostly kept pace with inflation, but last summer it started outpacing inflation big time. Of course, remember that at this time, *inflation itself was also speeding up rapidly*, so aircraft prices were going crazy to meet that inflation hike and then outpace even those high levels.
That pattern seems to have peaked this spring, where aircraft were priced ≈25% higher than inflation alone would predict - now we're climbing back down that hill rapidly and looks like we might get back on track with background inflation. Would love to talk shop about all this stuff, I spend like... gosh, way too much time thinking through these dynamics. But yes, I think roughly this spring or early summer, we hit the peak. Not only just because it's unsustainable to imagine, say, a 300k 1970's four seater, but because the data does seem to back this up at this point.