Many people ask the staff at Earnhardt Honda how we determine the auto trade in value. There are a number of steps involved in this process. Here’s what we can recommend after years in the business of buying, selling and evaluating used cars.
How Much is Your Car Worth? Three Steps to a Deal
Unlike a loaf of bread, a car’s value is subjective. An evaluation must include its age, its mileage, its condition, its model rankings, and much more. That’s why it is important to understand the different ways that cars are evaluated. It should help you get a ballpark figure for your vehicle. Here are the steps toward understanding auto trade in value.
Step 1. Researching a Range of Possible Values
Step 2. Narrowing down the possibilities
Step 3. Recognizing a fair offer.
Step 1. Researching a Range of Possible Values
How can you know what the value of your car is when there are so many websites offering to value it for you? Actually, you can just limit yourself to two sources. The first is Kelley Blue Book. The second is the Black Book. These two pricing guides rely on hundreds of sources and millions of data points. They do not always agree on the final conclusion because they have different outlooks.
Kelley Blue Book is considered the more consumer-friendly of the two pricing guides. That’s probably why it is used so often by other reputable sites, such as Edmunds and AutoTrader. You’ll find it on our site. We offer it as an evaluation tool to prospective sellers.
The Black Book also presents a range of values, but it is aimed more at car dealers than at consumers. This means that the values in it will appear higher. However, that is generally because they trend toward retail rather than wholesale. Dealers can’t pay the retail price because they are the retailer.
Step 2: Narrowing Down the Possibilities
Potentially there are hundreds of companies offering to buy your car. Many of these are purely internet entities with no roots in the community. They are hoping to make money off of consumers by using ‘cash for cars’ advertising to lure them into a deal.
So, the first thing a smart consumer needs to do is to eliminate car trading websites that make inflated promises about the value of cars or the amounts they will pay. Consumers should also avoid flashy used car lots that proclaim they’ll pay top dollar for your car. That’s a promise few dealers can keep.
Instead of falling for false promises, sellers should determine who has a reputation for honest deals in new car or used car sales. That will tell you all you need to know about the type of deal they will offer you for your used car.
Earnhardt Honda has built a reputation for honesty. We respect our customers whether they are buying from or selling to us. Since we need to buy used cars, we work hard to offer competitive deals to sellers. We can’t always offer the perfect deal, and we can’t make every seller happy, but we try to do our best every day. Please contact us if you want to know more about selling a car to us.
Step 3: Recognizing a Fair Offer
Recognizing a fair offer can be difficult. The wish of private sellers is for a big return on their old cars, but the market has other ideas. Blue Book and Black Book values can be too high in certain circumstances. In others they clash because they are using different data points to reach a conclusion.
At Earnhardt Honda, our goal is to accept the recommendations made by the Kelley Blue Book valuation tool whenever we can. However, the condition of the car is a major factor in whether or not we can offer the price that the seller is asking. Often we work on a compromise to make the customer as happy as we can.
Selling a car to Earnhardt Honda is an honest process that is built on solid data from the Blue Book, the Black Book and other sources. We can’t promise every seller that they will be 100 percent happy, but we can promise every seller that the process will be fair.
There’s a reputation on the line at Earnhardt Honda, and we aim to maintain that reputation through every transaction with the public. Now that you know more about the process, we invite you to use our valuation tool or just come to Earnhardt Honda to get a personal valuation of your vehicle.
Give us a chance to make a deal. You can turn your old car into cash in your pocket.
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