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Somebody here is tracking Chalets...not sure if this one is accounted for?
- Thread starter Chief Brody
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That guy is swinging for the fences with that price. Holy cow.
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Sorry but bwwhahaha...and I love these things and would entertain a reasonably priced one but it looks like those days are gone. (for now)
Different one, a dealer/flipper who's glommed onto the basically unsustainable asking price of the other '76 Chalet #0429 "alleged never-left-the-dealership time capsule original" listing. That one has an unresolved problem with the story, because on the back lower left of the rig is a plate that says "Superior, Hamburg New York", which is a used car dealership. If that '76 Chalet #0429 was sent straight from GM to the Kent MI dealership and the dealer kept it this whole time, as the dealer/flipper claims, it would not have a used car lot plate on the back.
Meanwhile, this other '77 Chalet in Wisconsin is #1158, which has gone through several sellers since I first saw it in a 2014 Nebraska farm auction for $1700. From those pics, somebody prior to that time incorrectly refurbished the camper interior in a much darker non-factory color of wood with cloth seats and a different color carpet & countertop. Much more recently, the Blazer was repainted. The tell-tale sign of what this particular one is worth is how its April 2020 ebay listing ended at a "reserve not met of $26,700, which I thought was quite some distance over the top for it having a non-original camper interior plus its other restoration faults.
Speculators. Friggen dirtbags.
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I'd take 3 of the $1700 ones. I've been driving squares since high school and never noticed the camper variations till I joined this forum. @a77blazerchalet did most of these end up away from the West coast originally? Just curious.
Tragedy is for the 7 or so buyers who bought the big dollar ones in the last few years, is that if they had asked me for contact info on the exact same rigs they ended up with before the dealer / flippers got to them, they could have paid half as much or less for almost each one. When the dealer / flippers hiked the prices and they were accepted without question, that ended up setting the unreal benchmark values. The one that I hadn't caught in advance was Chalet #1424 at the Houston Dec 2020 Mecum auction. Wouldn't surprise me in the least if it was in a previous Craigslist ad I missed somewhere, unspit-shined and at half the auction's ending price.
I don't mind when a savvy buyer sees a bargain, cleans it up / fixes some faults, and flips it for a profit. Capitalism works. What bugs me is when guys find one at a bargain price and then don't do squat to the rig beyond giving it a super spit-polish, and then double or triple the price. But what really steams me is when they hype it as the last one on the planet while outright misrepresenting its history or condition. In too many listings, the question should be "are you being funny by saying this rig with aftermarket wheels, missing stripes, a reupholstered interior, the weird doorknob on the back, and a lift kit is 'all original'??"
It seems they were distributed by GM all across the country to Chevy and GMC dealerships, and spread even wider after that. I've saved Craigslist / ebay / other online classifieds page listings for these ranging from Alaska to Venezuela and Europe. Perhaps because Iranians (maybe from the Shah era in the '80s) seem to favor a lot of GM cars from the '70s / '80s, I've found several in Iran, like this month-old Instagram page. One of these days, I'll get my act together, join Instagram and other photo sites, to ask for more info.
Back in 87 I worked on one in AZ, for my land lord he and wife used it all over. We had/have lots of east coasters in the winter. I think they never went home. I thought it was cool only one I have seen in person.
Chevy350Ben
Part time mall crawler
Ad says this is 1156. How do you know this is 1158? Is the seller mistaken?
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The only one I have seen in person is the one here that has the red rig. That is my dream camp truck.
"8"s look like "6"s when you just glance at them in bright sunlight. Since my silly 'hobby' goes all the way back to 2005 of trying to track every one of these still in existence, I actively look out for ebay / Craigslist sales ads among other searches, and I copy the text from those listings into a simple text file I have, while downloading the listings' photos. For this one, I have 6 different sales ad printouts, plus one of the owners alerted the guys about it at the Facebook page that the former owner of #0589 set up. I think I asked the owner at that time what serial number it was, and somewhere along the way, one of the owners or sellers provided me with a nighttime flash photo of the SN plate. Having photos is always better than just having the say-so of an owner, because more than once they've misread what the plate says. I have to beware of my own typos in my mega-spreadsheet on all of these, so I double-check and triple-check on them whenever possible.
@a77blazerchalet - worth adding in the BaT sale into this thread? Keep it all in this thread 
sold for $125k. Still cant believe it.
sold for $125k. Still cant believe it.
Many thanks for the alert!! If the link you have there shows more photos at the "73-75 K5 Blazer & Jimmy owners" Facebook page, it's not displaying anything I can see. The #0803 Chalet is one I was alerted back in 2018 to by someone who spotted it way off in the distance on a Silver Springs Nevada property. Via an address for the property, I was able to contact the realtor for the property who relayed my 'hobby tracking effort' to the owner who told me what its serial number was, but I haven't heard a thing about it afterward. If more pics and/or info on it can be shared, please do. Composite photo below of what I snagged from the then-current 2018 Zillow property ad.www.facebook.com
That one in the Bring a Trailer auction is Chalet #0429. More details, including the "Added Drama"™ bonus over in the thread I created for its auction.@a77blazerchalet - worth adding in the BaT sale into this thread? Keep it all in this thread
Do you think that sale will now be used as the standard for future list prices for these? Hope not, but you know how these people are. See that for $125k and Immediately think their rust bucket is worth $50k
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Do bears $hit in the woods? Of course, they will. From the ones sitting in a yard forever to the speculators that buy and flip them.
Actually, this $125 grand rig is already basically the outgrowth of the "standard" when Chalet #1385 was taken past the multiple bidders $10 grand mark all the way to its $21,500 reserve price by a single bidder in its 4th 2011 eBay listing. The bidder apparently didn't get the memo on the previous listings where it only topped $12,500, and if he'd contacted me at the time, I could have steered him to #1287 with its price of $10 grand, where he could have achieved the same overall condition as #1385 by removing its duck decals and doing some other minor restoration work. Back then, eBay allowed the public to look into winning bidders accounts to see what else they got - that guy bought classic Chevy trucks, Porsches, and really expensive antique furniture, so he clearly had money to burn and wanted a Chalet, cost-no-object. Since that rig made eBay and classic car dealer headlines, it's been a domino effect ever afterward for slickly advertised rigs through predominantly classic car dealer/flippers. Of the 7 or 8 big-dollar $20 grand+ Chalet sales I'm aware of, I know of only one that came out of a private seller (twice actually), and it went to a dealer/flipper who instantly tacked another $10 grand onto it, and the private buyer tried to sell it for break-even just months later, and the next private buyer who got it barely 4 weeks back now wants to sell it. All of the others were sold by dealer flippers who added in extraordinary markups to rigs that were available in the recent months or year earlier for half the prices or less.
With Chalet #0429, it's still a mystery of how much - or little, actually - it sold for to the current auction sellers. Meanwhile, there's probably going to be a rash of Craigslist / eBay sellers pointing to that BaT auction while trying to rigs way down the scale in comparability that'll never get sold because the niche market of guys with unlimited money and no time for research is really tiny, and they don't buy rust bucket rigs.
Indebted to you for that favor! Using the ad text, I was able to drop that into Google and find the one FB listing, which is what I need for my growing screengrab-to-paper-printout file & ad text computer file on these: https://www.facebook.com/groups/843986732317320/permalink/3794174853965145/
