Quote:
Originally Posted by javadog
Well, neither does looking at auction records, if you're lumping all cars of a particular type into one basket. Face it, there's more variability in condition, options, color desirability, etc. than a 2 month swing in the market.
FWIW, I used to be a dealer. We used the books, as did every other dealer, wholesale buyer, etc. that we dealt with. Any price is a starting point. Then you have to use your experience to adjust the number, for the things I mentioned above. There are other factors, too, but I'll skip those since I was addressing a simple question. To re-iterate, no dealer I know has ever used trade-in values as "the number" for buying cars at auction.
JR
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JR, I've been in the industry on one side or another for almost twenty years. The game has REALLY changed in the last decade.
Books used to be the only game in town. Then auctions used to mail out the data from their last sale. Then that became available online. Then they developed that data as "query-able". So now the old published books are fairly useless to guys who know what they are doing.
But you and I are on the same page. There is so much more to the value of a car than what the last one(s) sold for. Whether it was last month, or the last one down the lane. Color, options, miles, seasonal, regional, closed/open sale, buyback, dealer-owned or repo or lease return, smells, tires, paintwork, etc, etc, etc....... used cars are like snowflakes. It's an art. Trying to make it into a science is futile.