Jay Soneff’s first car was a 1927 Model-T Roadster.
“It just wasn’t good for dating,” he said.
Now, the 70-year-old real estate investor, broker and third generation Denverite owns 60 classic cars. Many of them are stored in his Soneff’s Master Garage at 2140 Arapahoe St. in the Ballpark neighborhood.
“I was a gearhead from day one,” Soneff said.
“Itap the universal communicator. You go anywhere with a car – ’50s, ’60s, ’70s – and you’re going to meet two new friends in the parking lot.”
But the garage holds more than his own collection. Around 80 cars, from rusted out husks to pristine classics, sit inside Soneff’s Master Garage and its body shop nearby. People from all over the Rocky Mountain region bring their vintage cars to get tuned or restored. His young mechanics toil away on Plymouth Barracudas and Chevrolet Malibus.
Muscle cars, the baby boomer darlings, dominate Soneff’s fleet. So too, do rides from the early 1950s, which are commonly restored to original condition and outfitted with newer equipment. But occasionally an older 1910s or ’20s classic or more modern ’80s or ’90s vehicle will get some love. The business has a one-year waiting list.
It all began in 1965. Soneff’s family had been in the parking lot business. His dad, John, started getting requests from patrons needing mechanical work on their cars. Work grew fast, so he brought on a mechanic to help.
After getting its start in the old Denver Cable Rail building at 1801 Lawrence St., the shop bounced around downtown before finally landing in Ballpark in 1975, when the elder Soneff acquired 2165 Curtis St.
The younger Soneff wasn’t intimately involved in the day-to-day workings of the garage throughout the early part of his career, opting to dive into commercial real estate. He navigated the boom times of the ’70s and bust times of the ’80s, founding Jamis Cos. in 1981.
Today, he controls a portfolio of mostly parking lots from Grand Junction to downtown. He’s even building his own competitor to LoopNet, the commercial real estate listing/search service.
But cars remained a passion. At 17, he built his first motor for a 1968 Plymouth GTX, and shortly after he started fix and flips. The first car he flipped was a 1969 Mercury Cougar.
“It had a 390-cubic-inch engine,” he said. “It was just really fast for its day. I remember my dad was a little concerned about how I was driving it.”
But the work took a back seat to his real estate career. Some deals that went south had to be made up with car sales. In 1989, he sold his 1971 Hemi Cuda convertible for $60,000 for that exact reason.
Five years ago, it fetched $6.2 million at auction. Only seven were produced, and just two had the four-speed transmission like Soneff’s did.
While Soneff bobbed and weaved his way through Denver’s growing pains of the ’80s and ’90s, the garage continued to evolve. In 1981, his dad purchased the 2140 Arapahoe building, where the operation remains to this day.
‘Fuel, air and spark’: The business of classic car restoration
Soneff’s Master Garage doesn’t turn a profit.
“Our goals are different from just the bottom line … We don’t pay ourselves rent so we break even,” he said.
He describes the business as a “discount shop,” charging $195/hour for its work. The competition’s hourly rates, he added, start at $250. Soneff’s mechanics are working on 10 to 20 cars at a time, 70% of which are paying customers. He also has about 10 cars from customers that pay for him to store them while they wait to be worked on.
His goal is to get cars back on the road, not turn them into stationary showpieces.
“We’re not into trailer queens,” he said. “We’re into drivers.”
But the work required to turn some of the cars around is extensive. Soneff has a separate off-site body shop about 10 minutes away where he fabricates metal and parts and paints the vehicles. The garage on Arapahoe Street is more for general service, like engine swaps, suspension improvements and other performance modifications.
Today’s buyers value old muscle and ’50s cars with new tech, like fuel injection, four-wheel disc brakes and improved suspensions for better handling, Soneff said. Trucks from the ’60s and ’70s have lately seen their values increase, too. Cars made before World War II, on the other hand, have seen their value evaporate.
Part of the profit equation has to do with Soneff’s mechanics. Currently, he has eight of them, and all but one are under 35; Soneff’s general manager is 27 and he just hired an 18 year old. He could certainly work on more cars with more labor, but finding talent is difficult. Classic cars, generally, are of interest to older generations. The people who can do the best work, though, are younger folks who can spend all day bent over the engine bay, ratcheting nuts and bolts.
“They all sit in the lunch room and pull out car videos. NASCAR, quarter mile, SEMA builds, dragster videos – itap all car talk,” Soneff said.
“You don’t have 20 computers … all you got to worry about is fuel, air and spark,” said 29-year-old employee Irvine Porras.
Jay relaunched the garage business in 2014, two years after his father died. When he started, it was just himself and Toby Maxwell, an aging mechanic then in his 70s.
But the garage was no small fry when it was getting back on its feet. Jay Leno, who knew Soneff’s dad and is a car buff, even stopped by in 2016 to check out the spot.
“We spent the whole day together,” Soneff said.
The real estate around him boomed during this time as Denver’s population surged and the city experienced a tech and millennial-fueled renaissance. The buildings next door to Soneff sold for a combined $10 million to make way for a new apartment development.
Soneff received two offers during this time to sell his building, first constructed in 1889.
“The developers of the building next door to me tried really hard to buy this property and I just wasn’t ready,” he said. “We actually had it under contract eight, nine years ago and thank God the buyer backed out.”
But the real value on the property comes from the cars inside.
First, there’s Soneff’s 1967 hunter green Mustang, sitting in pristine condition with only 24,000 miles on the odometer. He bought the car from the original owner. Sitting nearby in the basement is his 1983 Jeep Laredo, a rare two-door model his dad bought to plow the family parking lots.
Then there’s a 1954 green Hudson, a true family heirloom. The story goes that the car maker gave the vehicle to legendary racer Marshall Teague, who later sold it to Soneff’s relative, and his dad bought it from them. Soneff said the car is like a “rolling living room.”
The car collector isn’t too sentimental about most of his inventory. He sold off a batch of 100 vehicles in 2023.
“Itap kinda like you raise puppies … you gotta get rid of them,” Soneff said.
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