How does TradePending value cars?

It’s time to set the record straight about where TradePending gets its values from. Spoiler alert, it’s not from books. 

We’ve been valuing cars for almost a decade and we still hear this question almost every day, “Where does TradePending get its values from?” or “What books are you guys using for your values?”

Here’s the bottom line: we get our values by looking at the retail market, every single day, and by looking at the values in a dealer’s local market.

Let’s unpack each of those three foundations but first a quick thought exercise for you.

If your realtor came to you and said, “I think the value of your home should be tied to its wholesale cost, and I’m gonna value your downtown property as if it were in a small town in southern GA”, you’d laugh him out of the room.

Oddly, this is still how a lot of competitors value cars, but it’s not how we do it and let’s bring ourselves back to those three key points.

What’s the best indicator of how much cars are retailing for? Is it wholesale prices? Is it auction prices? Of course not. It’s how much they’re retailing for! We look at roughly 25,000 retail dealership websites across the US and Canada every day to understand what’s happening on every single vehicle’s retail ask price.

Did we mention we do this every single day? This concept of understanding the value of a vehicle every single day continues to prove itself resilient given how up and down the values of used cars have been the past 3 years.

Finally, when a consumer wants to know the value of their vehicle, we’re looking at comparables as close to the dealership as possible so that the value actually reflects what’s happening in their local market.

So how come our biggest competitors still don’t value cars this way? Your guess is as good as mine.