In these dark times of deflating revenues and plummeting rates, OneBeacon Insurance Group can at least find a bright spot: People still want insurance for their collector cars.

Like most second-quarter reports in the property/casualty industry, OneBeacon bore ill news – it lost $23.8 million in net income from this time last year. But the Canton-based insurer saw an increase of 31 percent, or $53.8 million, in premiums for specialty lines during the first half of 2008, a jump the quarterly filings attributed to a collector car-and-boat business venture.

As of the second quarter, OneBeacon allied itself with Michigan-based Hagerty Insurance Agency where OneBeacon does the under-writing for Hagerty, an agency that has sold to collector car and boat owners for 25 years.

A Driving Niche

OneBeacon has a bevy of niche businesses, said spokeswoman Carmen Duarte. It has underwriting offerings for things like public en-tities, ships and cargo – even professional liability for entertainment agents, as of January of this year.

The company wants to home in on these types of targeted industry groups, Duarte said; “It fits very much into the kind of company that we are working very hard to become.”

After rising steadily for the past decade or so, car-collecting itself has plateaued, said Hagerty CEO McKeel Hagerty. But the wealthy, large Baby Boomer generation is still collecting.

“Americans love cars, and they love old cars,” he said.

And a sour economy wouldn’t necessarily slow collecting as much as one might think. Hagerty notes that many of these cars aren’t wildly valuable – the typical insured value for Hagerty’s cars are about $35,000, and that many such cars are inherited instead of bought.

Despite that collecting plateau, more insurers are getting into the collector car insurance business, Hagerty said, mostly because the soft market has driven them to go after new niche business wherever they can find it. But Hagerty, who inherited the longstanding family business, said insuring these types of cars is tougher than it seems, partly because owners are so particular about how they’re main-tained and repaired.

“[Other insurers] think, ‘how hard can it be?'” Hagerty said.