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Traders - which do you use, and why?
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If only all you needed to do was buy at one price in the book - sell at the other, it'd be simple!!
Rather than spend your £$£$£ on subscription to either, I'd buy a WhatCar? & Parkers price guides to refer to. Use them for what they are - A GUIDE - then, when you visit auctions, you'll get an idea of which cars sell for 'Trade' money, are always making over OR under.You'll also find them handy for model changes & variations/insurance groups/trim levels.Keep them out of site, so as to gain credibility, though!!
This is where trying to specialize in a particular model & your own experience will come together.If you know you sold 3 Astra 1.4's last month for £xxxxx & only paid £yyyyy, but couldn't shift the Mondeo you took in as part exchange, you know that you've gone wrong somewhere!!
VB
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Just an observation but I made several visits to BCA Blackbushe in December armed with a copy of CAP. One thing I noticed very quickly was that pretty much every car I was interested in always went a few hundred over book price - not due to private bids either! In fact, as a rough guide I just used to get the value from CAP and then add £300 which was surprisingly accurate for the kind of stuff I wanted to bid on! For what it's worth most people at Blackbushe seem to use Glass's.
I reckon Vansboy is right about getting a copy of Parkers and keeping it handy. Seems to be the only guide that the general public use so it's got to be worth having it around just to cross check prices. Also very true about getting to specialise in a particular vehicle. Many of the experienced traders at Blackbushe have an instinct for the price a car should make and you rareley see them frantically thumbing through the price guides - even when a car eneters the ring that wasn't in the catalogue!
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I wouldn't even try to use Parkers - just buy a copy of Autotrader in your area every couple of weeks, and try to memorise the prices of the cars you are likely to be buying.
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I wouldn't even try to use Parkers - just buy a copy of Autotrader in your area every couple of weeks, and try to memorise the prices of the cars you are likely to be buying.
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Look left, let the computer do the work, save money, support HJ and get up to date info.
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Okay Owen, I admit I'm not a trader but at the auctions I've been to I tend to have a knack of estimating a car's hammer price within about 5 seconds and getting it pretty close most of the time.
As far as I can see, Glass's and CAP are for providing peace of mind and
1. Showing the punter what a 'great deal' he's getting on his trade-in when you know the guide undervalues it and
2. Stopping the new salesman who used to sell kitchens/PCs/houses from offering £4k for an N-reg Astra on his first day.
I reckon that you need to be able to size up the condition, saleability and value of a car during the bid process in order to succeed; after all you need to know not just how much you can probably get for the car but also how close the car is to retail quality at the hammer price, which no paper guide can ever tell you - and it's the second part that stops me from doing it on the side.
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Thanks for the advice. I have been using the autotrader website to value cars up to now, and it's a pretty accurate way of estimating price in my experience. The only problem with it is that it only gives you a feel for asking prices, not necessarily prices achieved. This means that i can be looking at a particular car whose price might range anywhere from 5k privately or at a small independent dealer, to 7-8k at a main dealer, for the same model/similar mileage.
I think i may stick to parker's and autotrader at the moment, especially since as i'll be working from home my asking prices will have to be somewhere between private and trade to compete, so the suggested retail prices in the guides may not really be applicable. My general rule of thumb is that i need the screen price of my car to be towards the bottom of the price range i see on autotrader.
Thanks again for all your help, it really has been invaluable so far, not just in this thread, but in the several others i've posted. Just hope i can make a success of it now - aiming to start buying in the next 2-3 weeks!
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In the good old day's, well just a few years ago, I worked for Lex and we were always instructed by HO to value our stock using CAP. I could never understand why (and never got a proper answer) when all the sales staff used Glass's. My Sales Manager at the time used thirty years experience and Glass's then confirmed his valuation ! I can count on one hand the number of trade losses incurred.
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I always work on the 'what price can i get for it theory'then work a margin in,that then is the price i will pay,not rocket science really,more about experince.
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Owen, although parkers/autotrader website/gut feeling etc are useful they may not provide you with much reassurance when you are bidding for real and everyone around you is using Glass's or CAP.
You sound like you are going to have a fair crack at this so I would say take the plunge and get one of the 2 trade guides. Either that or specialise in a particular model and do some serious homework beforehand for prices of all the variants. Tip: dont choose anything french if you decide to take this approach!
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On certain cars and certain models, CAP and Glass's can be miles out. On the stuff i have been looking at, Parkers has been slightly more accurate recently. But this has not always been the case.
Lookng on autotrader is all well and good. It can show you how many of a particular type of car are advertised, which you can contrast with what you think the demand for the car is. But what autotrader does not tell you is what the cars actually sell for. You just have to make an educated guess as to what you can get for it, and what you and others you know have sold similar cars for in the past. 12 months of parkers is a lot cheaper than the £300 or whatever Glass's costs. As King Arthur has wisely said in the past if there are a number of similar cars advertised for widely varying prices, it usually means a lot of them are sticking and only the cheapest are selling.
The guides are more accurate for everyday cars, than rarer or more specialist cars. I have even seen traders advertising what i beleive to be perfectly good cars for LESS than some guides quote for a top book trade purchase. Also the book doesnt tell you how much extra people are prepared to pay for certain extras.
I think if you are buying a certian type of car, you would be better keeping your money and buying parkers etc, and recording and remembering prices cars actually make at auction.
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