This NSX FAQ entry has been migrated to the NSX Wiki -> http://www.nsxprime.com/wiki/Pricing 

How Can I Determine Fair Market Value?

By definition, fair market value is whatever someone is willing to pay. Many people seem to confuse market value with the value of a car to them personally. Additionally, some "dreamers" look for the lowest price they can find regardless of not knowing the condition of the car, whether it is an auction price, whether the car is on the other side of the country, whether the car may have been a crash repair, etc. and then expect the same price on a nice car from every private seller they talk to. I have seen MANY NSXs and all the ones that sold for a really low price were sold at that price for a reason. Here, based on my fairly extensive observations and interactions with the NSX community, along with input from some other very active members of the community and dealers who specialize in the NSX, is the general market value for used NSXs. This table is updated quarterly, so yes, it is current.

Keep several things in mind when you view this table.

You may need to adjust for other factors such as location, an extraordinarily high or low number of miles compared to condition, condition better or worse than expected for age and miles, crash repair, etc.

This is based on US cars only. Pricing in other countries varies even after you convert currencies.

What Affects Used NSX Prices?

Condition

Condition is absolutely the most important factor in determining the market value of a used NSX. It is common to see a $5,000 - $10,000 variation between two otherwise comparable NSXs because one is in excellent condition and another is not. The condition is a combination of several things:

Paint - A car that has been used as a daily driver and parked outside for 10 years is just not going to have very good paint compared to one that has been garaged and used as a fair-weather weekend pleasure car. Poor paint work also devalues the car. Some buyers are turned off by any paint work at all, but the reality is that a car with good paint work is fine.

Body - Much more important than paint is any accident history that resulted in body work. The aluminum frame can be very difficult and expensive to fix correctly, and as a result there are many poorly repaired early model NSXs out there. These cars often handle poorly and will not provide proper protection in the event of an accident. A car with a salvage title can be very hard to sell, and is worth far less than any comparable NSX without a salvage history.

Mechanical - Is it up to date on all maintenance and service? Are there maintenance records? Are there any outstanding issues? Maintenance items can impact price considerably, so adjust your expectations appropriately.

Interior - Most people do not want to buy a car like the NSX if the interior is in poor condition..

Miles

The NSX holds up very well with high miles, but the fact is that even a well maintained 150,000 mile car is just not going to be in as good condition as one with 15,000 miles. As a result, mileage does affect price, though the only really dramatic price difference is for extremely low mile NSXs, say under 20,000 for a 10 year old model. These cars always command a premium as resale. A 1991 with under 15,000 miles in mint condition may sell for over $40,000, while a 1991 with 150,000 miles will probably go for close to half that even if it is otherwise in good condition.

Warranty

As you can see from the table above, the model year on average takes a little drop when the original factory warranty runs out. The current factory warranty is 4 years / 50,000 miles. If a car has a good extended warranty (emphasis on "good"), and the warranty is transferable, that usually ads some value to a car that would otherwise be out of warranty.

Location

Prices for cars like the NSX tend to vary by 10% or more in different parts of the country. In general the southwestern and south central US seem to have lower prices and the Midwest and east coast seem to have higher prices.

Need To Sell

If someone needs to sell a car quickly, they will often take considerably less for it. If someone is in no particular hurry to sell and has a nice car, they will usually wait for someone willing to pay a little more for a nicer car.

Transmission

Automatic Transmission - While it does not actually devalue the car, it can be much harder to find a buyer for an automatic NSX. As a result, some sellers who are not willing to wait will discount the price on an automatic NSX by a couple thousand dollars in order to expedite the sale. This is good news for anyone looking to buy an automatic, but please do not make the mistake of buying an automatic NSX just because you can save a little money. Buy what you really want or you will almost certainly regret it later. Some other sellers are willing to wait for the right buyer and do not discount the price of the car.

"Snap Ring" Transmissions - In short, because of a manufacturing problem, some '91 and '92 cars MAY have a transmission problem waiting to happen. There are two ways to approach this. First is to wait until it fails and fix it. The other is to fix it before it fails, but until it fails you never really know if it is going to fail. See the FAQ entry under Troubleshooting / Transmission for a full description of this problem and the options for fixing it before or after the fact. As relates to pricing, if a car's transmission is in the range for this problem, it is pretty common to reduce the price by around $1500 - $2000 from what it would otherwise would have been. The buyer can then use that money to fix the problem either before or after it fails, if it ever does fail.

Color

Like the transmission, a given color does not devalue the car, but some colors are much more popular than others and thus some sellers of less popular colors will discount the car in order to expedite the sale. Similarly, some colors are very popular and if the seller is willing to wait for the right buyer they can actually bring a premium. Less popular colors are Midnight Pearl, Brooklands Green, and maybe some of the darker silvers. More popular colors are Sebring silver, Monte Carlo Blue and Spa Yellow. Red and black are actually the most popular, but there are so many red and black NSXs that they do not command a premium at resale. Do not get overly worked up over color - buy the color you want. The fact is that there are many people who absolutely love Brooklands Green and spend months searching for just the right Brooklands Green car, and likewise there are people who hate silver or yellow. These are just general trends I have noticed over the years.

How Do Modifications Affect Price?

The most important thing to realize about modifications is: The more heavily modified the car, the smaller the group of potential buyers. It is easy to sell a car with headers and exhaust, but difficult to sell one with a custom high-boost turbo setup with complicated fuel management and a huge custom stereo system. A big part of the  problem is that if the buyer wants to finance the car, the lender will only lend towards the value of the car itself, not the modifications. This is a good part of the reason it can take longer to sell a car with modifications - you need a buyer who has more money and an interest in the modifications. The second issue is that there are just fewer people interested in a very heavily modified car. This does not mean the car is worth less, but the seller may need to be willing to wait longer to find the right buyer. If not, they may consider discounting the car in order to sell it quickly.

In general, approximately 50% of the "street price" of the more popular modifications such as intake, headers, exhaust, supercharger, big brake kit, etc. Note that this is only 50% of the street price of the parts - labor is not included.

More "personalized" modifications such as wheels, custom stereo system, body kits, or any changes to the interior, are usually a loss as resale. If possible it is usually better to return those areas of the car to stock and try to sell such aftermarket parts separately.

What About Pricing Guides?

Pricing guides are in the business of selling pricing guides. Check out what a 1995 NSX is worth in NADA and then compare that to Black Book. Almost a $10,000 difference. The reason there are many different guides is that different people use them for different purposes. Kelly Blue Book retail pricing, for example, tends to be high so sellers like to quote it when selling a car. NADA wholesale prices tend to be low, so dealers like to use it to lowball customers on their trade-in value. That is a basic explanation of pricing guides in general.

As they relate to the NSX (or any other specialty car), it should be noted right up front that generic pricing guides do not work well for determining true market value of very low production specialty cars. Most of them take a standard depreciation formula and apply it to every vehicle. But the fact is that just doesn't reflect the real market prices for specialty cars. The two most commonly noted are Edmunds (www.edmunds.com) and Kelly Blue Book (www.kbb.com). They use standard depreciation formulas and as a result their prices are way out of line with the true market prices for used NSXs.

NADA (www.nadaguides.com) sends a questionnaire to thousands of dealers every month. Then the dealers are supposed to write down what they have sold cars for. They could write anything down, and most dealers throw the form away - filling the form out doesn't make them any more money, so why do it? Dealers themselves rarely use NADA guides other than to lowball a trade-in value.

The Black Book (www.blackbookusa.com) is another story. Black Book, from the National Auto Research Division of Hearst Business Media Corporation, makes money from dealers paying them $500 a year membership. No outside interference to corrupt the numbers. They can't be manipulated like NADA. There are still two problems with using the Black Book to price and NSX.

1) The Black Book works strictly off auction values. NSXs at auction are, on average, in much worse condition than those for private sale, which results in lower prices. More importantly, since the NSX is a specialty vehicle, a dealer knows they are probably going to have a harder time moving it out of inventory. So they will only bid on it if they think there is a lot of profit left between their bid price and what they think they can sell it for. This also keeps auction prices down.

2) The number of NSXs moving through auction is too small to be a statistically relevant source of data, particularly for the later model year cars where perhaps only one or two a month go through auction nation-wide.

What About Dealer or Online Auction Prices?

People who try to use dealer auction or eBay auction prices to figure out how much they should pay end up becoming very frustrated. Those prices are thousands of dollars less than a nice NSX for sale from a private party. The prospective buyer then thinks many private sellers are asking too much, while the private sellers consider their offers to be ridiculously low. There are many  reasons these dealer and auction prices are not anything like an actual private party sale price:

Dealer Auctions - Dealers buy cars at auction for the purpose of reselling them to make a profit. The faster they can turn over their inventory, the more money they make. An uncommon specialty car like the NSX is harder to sell than a high-demand car such as a C5 Corvette or a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Therefore a dealer is only going to bid on an NSX at auction if they can get it for an extremely good price so they can either sell it at a low price to help move it more quickly, or get a bigger profit to make the slower sale worth while. Sports cars at auction are also much more likely to have led a rough life, be crashed-and-repaired, or have other "issues." There are no maintenance records. All things things drive dealer auction prices way down.

Online Auctions  - Online auctions are a flawed source of information for sale prices for many reasons. A few of the key points: (1) A disproportionate number of high-end cars on eBay have problems which are not disclosed. This scares many people away from all the cars. (2) There have been quite a few highly publicized cases of outright auction fraud. This also scares some people away from making any major purchase through an online auction. (3) Online auctions are viewed by many as simply another venue for listing and finding cars for sale. Many cars listed in online auctions are later sold outside the auction service to buyers who found the car through the auction. Thus the sale price is never recorded by the auction service. (4) Most potential bidders live to far away to inspect the car before placing a bid. Not many people will commit to buying an expensive sports car sight-unseen from someone they don't know.