What Book Does TradePending Use?
We don’t use books. Now that I’ve spoiled the ending, keep reading if you want to understand how we actually value cars.
The question “What book does TradePending use?” is one we hear frequently, and it comes from an honest place: people thinking that car values can only come from books.
Fortunately for today’s car buyers, we don’t use books. We do five things differently.
We look at local market data. We’re still the only vehicle valuation methodology that starts by looking at comparable vehicles for sale as close to the dealer’s location as possible. We start with a radius of 25 miles and move out from there until we find enough vehicles to deliver a value within a range of confidence.
We measure retail “ask” prices, not wholesale values, not book values, and we don’t use hidden calculations to arrive at the value.
We only look at franchise dealerships. We do not look at third parties, no big box retailers, no Facebook marketplace, no independent dealerships. This gives us the highest likelihood of presenting a value that represents reality for our customers by comparing truly front-line ready and professionally retailed units.
We update the values daily. That’s proved really important given the volatility of prices the past few years.
We provide estimated costs to recondition the vehicle and make it front-line ready, based upon NADA data where available, amongst other proprietary industry research.
So what? Why does this approach matter? When a person walks in holding a book value that’s not based in reality, they will distrust you and the new, based-in-reality number, not the book value that wasn’t based upon real-time, local market data. Ouch.