Valuation Guides Used by Dealers for trade-ins

[ilovemygenesis]

What Guides do you find dealers use more to value your trade ins, KBB or NADA or another guide?

 

[Richard Ft. Lauderdale]

I am getting a mailing from my dealer almost every week that they will give me more than something called "Black Book" for my car.

 

[cglex]

Blackbook and its incarnations is what is used by all that buy and sell cars. It is based on wholesale auction data. These days pros can get online access to vehicle specific auction data. When I was working in a facet of the car business 15 years ago, Black Book was usable and accurate and everything else including KBB, Edmunds and NADA were worthless. I don't know about the depth of Black Book data for older model vehicles or if there is any good source other than local knowledge and experience. I recently saw a value your trade in link to a Black Book variant on the Hyundai USA (I think) site. There may be other good wholesale data sources now as well.

 

[Mark_888]

Another option is to take your car to CarMax and they will give you a firm quote that is usually good for 7 days.

 

[Ruissimo]

I went through Autotrader.com

Found a local pricing center, and took my car there. Carfax was really nice to me, and I got a super offer on my car. 3 days later, I got my Genny.

 

[Effin Ponderous]

Dealers use a combination of things, but Galves is the most widely used and also the lowest pricing (what a surprise). The other trick is they now do searches on the Internet to see what your car is (will) sell for. They use that as a "guide" to tell you why your car isn't worth what you want. be careful with that because they always compare with vicars that have higher mileage than yours.

 

[douglasqualls]

My opinion is that most dealers use auction value as a guide to trade in price.

 

[jnc2000]

Auction value - or black book depending on dealer.

Best bet is not be afraid to hold your line on the realistic number you want for your car. (Hint: it's not going to be KBB)