Quote:
Originally Posted by crowed
So is KBB not really a good indicator of what we should be paying for used cars? I used an app called "Snafu" to look up this particular VIN and it said the "auction car value" was $52k for this car/mileage combination. Since this car wasn't bought at an auction by the dealer, I am not sure how they came up with that price, but interesting to see nonetheless.
I am trying to find a similar car purchased by a user in the past to compare but can't find an apples-to-apples comparison. I appreciate the heads up as I'll be doing a bit more research now.
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the best price would be Manheim dealer-only auction clearing prices for comparable models/mileage/location cars.
The theory is this, if the dealer fails to sell the car, their minimum price they will receive will be around the recent manheim auction clearing prices. so you will see that most used cars will be marketed at a margin over those prices, and trade-ins will be offered either at the auction prices or even slightly below. This essentially locks in a profit on these cars!
How do you get access to these prices?
make friends with some people who has access as dealers themselves. There are also some ppl on this forum who has access, but they need to be careful, the auction data is proprietary for "members" only, so they could get sued for displaying it publicly.
I haven't seen a Manheim auction pricing run thread recently, but do a search on this forum by "Manheim" "auction" keywords, you'll see some old prices, then do a quick approximation based on those dates the posts were made and the year/model car they were looking at to get a good idea what the dealer-only markets are valuing these cars. I'm guessing your car would be in the Mid-$50k range or low-$50k range.
Finally, another app that does a similar function is called "Car-tel" or something like that. Problem with that app is, I think they give you last clearing price in the country. although it gives you a good idea, the data has many bias as you can imagine. We're not selling SP500 stock here where it's liquid product, the price ranges vary greatly, and the prices quoted on the app (last time I check) is severly "scrubbed".
You can also use Truecar.com, although it's a great source to use for new car pricing, it still shows after-sales pricing (dealer profit margins baked in), which isn't ideal b/c what if 90% of the buyers were all getting ripped off with a $4k profit margin, etc? Truecar aggregates figures from state motor registry figures, so it represent true "walk out" prices of car before state sales taxes are assessed, so one can also argue on a microeconomic basis that it represents "market price" of what consumers are willing to pay.
KBB I believe is also "scrubbed" data. I believe KBB is also "self-reported" data from the dealers themselves, so the number represent prices with average dealer profit baked in.