Red book accurate

[Nero]

Has anyone found the 'red book' suggested selling prices accurate?
I want a VW T4 dual cab syncro - red book says $10000-13000 and only one found so far is $10k up on this. So is the red book telling porkies?

[GTAM]

It's a guide that is influenced by variables. Personally I don't even take it into consideration. But problems can arise because insurance co.s and the like do.

Once apon a time it was not available to the public, only dealers got to see it. Then it was more realistic, now it's gone to shit.

[Paddington]

has no application in regards to Victorian pricing I've found...

[farmsci]

Redbook takes new car RRP
Apply depreciation calculator
Spit out number

No consideration for popularity, rarity, desireability. Its usually misleading and useless.

[GTAM]

I was under the impression that redbook also obtains information from Transport authorities regarding prices of sold vehicles?

[GTREA]

I traded two VW Commercials in last year.

Both were the best low k examples you would find for the year.

Dealer offered exactly Red Book top dollar price for both, as I had checked beforehand.

I am guessing though he wouldn't have traded to many so wouldn't have had much to go on.

[GTREA]

From my limited dealings with it, it appears fairly accurate on the newer vehicles.

[farmsci]

From my experience redbook undervalues prestige, overvalues run of the mill stuff, GROSSLY overvalues oddballs (Saab, Landrover, anything French etc) and is mildly accurate for the occasional everyday non-fleet car

[Dogsballs]

I was under the impression that redbook also obtains information from Transport authorities regarding prices of sold vehicles?

hence lots of the normal cars get undervalued so you pay less rego. people who own saabs etc won't tell porkies so put the correct price down.

[GTAM]

Saabs have always had terrible resale. But yes that's what I was getting at. A lot of people lie to pay less duty on tranfering rego. Hence the bad accuracy of redbook.

[Uncle]

Never.

[Captiva Fan]

Redbook takes new car RRP
Apply depreciation calculator
Spit out number

No consideration for popularity, rarity, desireability. Its usually misleading and useless.

Actually, no, that's total crap.
What you've described is how they attempt to predict future values based on a best-guess & on prior depreciation of a particular model. It's effectively a guess based on how that model's performed in the past; which is the best you can do. But that's got SFA to do with how the current used values are calculated.

They gather auction results (the main source of info), they look at asks in classifieds, and they also have contacts at dealers. Each month they start at the Aardvark Motor Company's AA Class, and work through to the Zzzetland Zephyr.
Now obviously there aren't going to be examples of everything every month. Most of the time you can get by for a few months by looking at the trend of how a particular model is going, and moving the entire range by that percentage each month ... eg. if you only have sales figures for 5 2005 Liberty GT's and sales figures for 3 2.5i Luxuries, then you can see how they've dropped compared to the previous month & drop the other 2005 Liberties by the same percentage ... however you also have to look at what the trends in depreciation have been for the last few months as well, because you're not going to actually believe a model might've stopped depreciating for a month.

The above gets enough samples to do the vast majority of cars, but where it's difficult to get right are the really low volume models & old stuff. I mean how can you value a Phase III GTHO accurately when one sells at auction one day for $700k & two weeks later one sells in the same condition for half the price?

There're also regional variations, I'm not sure how that's handled at the consumer level, but when it was just for dealers we'd have a section up the back which had a matrix of rule-of-thumb set of modifiers you could apply for certain types of vehicles in certain areas; eg. diesel 4WDs in FNQ.

If you're looking for pricing on something wierd like a particularly sought-after version of a DR30 then Red Book is not for you (and it states as much). But for something like a VW T4 dual-cab synchro, it's possibly 2 months behind but shouldn't be heaps out unless there're regional variations causing havoc where you're looking.

Dealer offered exactly Red Book top dollar price for both, as I had checked beforehand.
I am guessing though he wouldn't have traded to many so wouldn't have had much to go on.

No, no dealer would use Red Book for a price they'd give you for a trade-in. Any wholesaler caught using something like Red Book would be under some serious employment-review; that's firing behaviour, wholesalers should know that stuff off the top of their head, and if they don't they'll give someone who specialises a call.

[[ryan]]

Never even close for any car I've bought/sold lately. Seems like more of a bullshit tool used by dealers to shaft people on trade-in prices. "Redbook says it's worth this at the most, we'll give you this, it's $1000 more!" but then you look at what they're actually selling for and it's shitloads up on that. Even the "private sale" values are not even close on a lot of cars. I don't even bother with Redbook any more. Obviously where they're getting their numbers from is not a true representation of the market.

[260BC]

Perhaps the market is a lot more volatile than it used to be with a lot of price variations.

[Southo]

Geez Forg, Anyone would reckon you used to work there.. :p