Agnlesey Rare Number Plate Sells For High Price

A vehicle registration which belonged to the seventh car ever registered on Anglesey more than a century ago has been sold for almost £40,000 at auction.

The EY 7 number dates back to 1903 and bears the island’s designated EY county registration code, which was commonplace on Anglesey number plates before they were phased out in 2001.

The sale, which was held at Morgan Evans’ auction house at Gaerwen on Thursday, garnered unprecedented interest, according to company director Simon Jones.

“It garnered a lot of interest as it belonged to only the seventh car that was ever registered on Anglesey, which was in 1903 when there were were hardly any cars on the roads at all,” he said.

“The guide price was between £20,000 to £25,000, but it’s telling of the amount of interest there was that the eventual sale price was much higher.

“The plate has been held by a family from the island all this time, and it’s nice to see it stay here, having been bought by a local businessman.”

EY 7 was not the only plate that went under auctioneer Simon Bower’s hammer.

Until the practice was scrapped 16 years ago, the last two letters on number plates usually indicated where the car was initially registered.

At last week’s auction, 10 AEY sold for £5,100, 4 AEY sold for £5,000, 77 REY sold for £3,800, and 17 OEY sold for £3,700.

Mr Jones added: “All the plates were sold to local buyers, with the auction house packed to the rafters.

“The EY 7 plate is a particularly unusual item, and not something we come across often at all.

“But such is the interest this time around, we hope to try to source some more.”

How close a series of letters or numbers are to a real name of word: if the match quality is high (and the numbers and letters are very convincing in making a popular word), the value of the registration plate will be higher. This means that a match like 5IMON, for the name Simon, will be worth a lot more than a more obscure set of letters and numbers that are not as convincing a match, such as S17 MMM for the name Sam.

The style of the plate: this means establishing if it is a new-style plate, an older-style format or if it is dateless or Irish, for instance. Other options are that it is a prefix-style plate or a suffix-style plate. New-style number plates, which have been produced since 2001, tend to be the least valuable because they are a bit less appealing to some collectors, plus the rule about not having plates that are newer than your car can also come into play, putting people off from buying a newer-style plate for their older car. Prefix-style number plates, which were in production between 1983 and 2001 can be more popular as more vehicles are entitled to have those licence numbers, and they may have fewer characters in total. Suffix-style plates, issued from 1963 to 1983 are relatively rare, which means they can attract higher prices than prefix-style plates and newer designs. Dateless number plates, also known as cherished number plates, were produced between 1903 and 1963 and are nearly always the most valuable number plate configurations; they have fewer digits and their dateless nature means that people can hide the age of their car. Irish number plates are similar to dateless number plates, especially because they don’t have a year identifier. They also tend to be cheaper than other types of vehicle registration plates.

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