I'm am concerned about the price being fair. The Kelley bluebook and edmunds puts the value at several thousand less. The price analysis though said good deal at below market value
Asked by RobertCapwell Sep 05, 2014 at 04:01 PM about the Mazda MAZDASPEED MX-5 Miata
Question type: Shopping & Pricing
2 Answers
Each system uses a different method for pricing cars. If you go to NADA for prices, you'll see a fourth. Cargurus uses an average of listed offering prices. The final sale price is likely to be lower. Edmunds (which I think is 100% completely unreliable) claims to average the prices that DMVs report, and then adjusts them with a mathematical formula. Apparently, Edmunds adjusts DOWN from DMV prices. The trouble with this is that no private party with any sense is going to report an actual sale price to the DMV because it means paying higher sales taxes. Another fact about Edmunds is that its big customers are used car lots. It tries to discourage private parties from selling directly to other private parties, and encourages them (us) to sell really cheap to its used-car-lot customers. So Edmunds is financially motivated to seriously understate actual prices. KBB claims to use a variety of pricing sources. It is the oldest and usually considered the most reliable benchmark. However, I think true sale prices are slightly lower than KBB. KBB and NADA prices seem to be fairly close to each other, in my experience.
I've only been in the car business (Dealer) for 40 years, and only buy/sell about 600 per year, so I'm still learning...But, if you can buy cars at KBB, you can make a dandy living wholesaling those cars at any dealer auction...they are so low it's not funny....