Supply and demand is a simple concept to understand but a difficult one to master. Most students learn about the concept in high school or earlier, but even grown adults with loads of disposable income seem to have a difficult time grasping why it's so important. In regards to limited edition cars, supply and demand are what dictates a car's value. If an automaker only builds 100 examples of a special edition car and there are 1,000 people in the world who are willing to buy one, prices will likely go up.

This is what happened with the 991 generation Porsche 911 GT2 RS. Porsche reportedly only built 1,000 examples of the car and dealer markups went out of control when it first arrived. Some buyers paid well over $500,000 for a car with a base price of "just" $293,000.

While we certainly wouldn't pay about a 70% premium to get a rare car, the value could have been justified due to the car's rarity. As it turns out, however, the early demand for the GT2 RS may have been completely blown out of proportion. We found a whopping 54 examples of the GT2 RS currently for sale, which must mean the original owners bought the cars just to flip them for a profit. If Porsche did only built 1,000 examples of the car, it means more than one in twenty owners has already sold theirs - and that's only factoring cars in the US! Car flipping has become a very common practice in recent years and has made it difficult for anyone to afford limited edition track cars.

Based on what we are observing in the GT2 RS market, we hope car flippers will be deterred from buying limited edition track cars. Although the GT2 RS can still command close to $500,000 for a well-optioned paint-to-sample model, we found examples starting at around $345,000. This is a massive dip from when the car first went on sale in 2018.

To be frank, we can't imagine why anyone would be willing to pay over the original sticker price for a GT2 RS at this point. Based on the simple concept of supply and demand, price should not increase unless the demand outstrips the supply. In the case of the GT2 RS, there are currently 54 examples just sitting on dealer lots waiting for buyers. This doesn't even include the 15 brand-new GT2 RS (both 2018 and 2019 model years) that are currently listed for sale in the US, or other cars up for sale in the rest of the world. Perhaps GT2 RS owners realized how many other owners were selling their cars and decided to offload theirs before values plummeted.

We still think the GT2 RS is a spectacular car, one that has set multiple track records for a production car. But we often have to sit back and ask ourselves whether a car is truly worth its asking price. Paying around $293,000 for a GT2 RS seems fair, but shelling out almost half a million seems outrageous in our opinion.

We don't know exactly why so many people have decided to sell their GT2 RS. Perhaps owners are gearing up for the 992 911, or maybe the GT2 RS's 700 horsepower 3.8-liter twin-turbo flat-six proved to be too much for them to handle. In any case, we hope this example proves that customers shouldn't buy into the artificial demand by paying massive dealer markups for a new car.