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.
MCM said:
No I do not want to read FAQ. LOL LOL
:biggrin:
LOL LOL You just did! :biggrin: :biggrin: :wink:
