A California man is looking to cash in on his longtime vanity plate, testing the relatively new market for second-hand licenses and the proof is bolted right on his bumpers. His plate? It simply reads “CASH” and it’ll cost an interested buyer $2 million.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, patent lawyer Claude Arthur Stuart Hamrick—CASH are also his initials—is willing to part ways with the plates he’s had for more than 50 years. Hamrick registered the plates in 1970 when vanity plates were first available in California, which has become his trademark of sorts around Silicon Valley.
“Every time I traded cars, the dealers tried to buy it from me. Every car dealer in San Jose wanted that plate,” Hamrick told the newspaper. “I told them I wouldn’t sell it for a million dollars.” (Eds note: He’ll sell it for $2 million, apparently.)
Although California has more than its share of vanity plates, the market there is relatively new. A dealer called Plate Broker specializes in selling vanity plates to interested buyers, which is legal in California even if it’s relatively new. Hamrick’s plate is listed on the site for $2 million alongside other plates: “888” (price not listed), “BETTING” ($125,000), “CINEMA” ($1,895,000), “GO VIRAL,” ($3,888,888), and more. The owner of the California plate “MM” is asking $24.3 million on Plate Broker.
Overseas, the practice of selling vanity plates is more common; a plate in Hong Kong with just the letter “W” sold for $3.3 million (26 million HKD). Car owners in the Middle East have paid up to $14 million for vanity plates, too.
Whether reselling vanity plates in California reaches the same heights isn’t clear, but Hamrick has had his “CASH” plates on sale for more than two years now and the lack of an interested buyer doesn’t seem to dissuade his attempt at cashing in on his plate or lower his price.
“It’s like buying domain names back in 1996. … Do you think the guy that bought fb.com knew that Facebook would have been a thing in 15 years?” he said.
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