Blue Book Value?

[lmartun]

Re: Blue Book Value?

Dealers don't use Blue book as its basically wrong 90% of the time. If you look its geared for dealers to use in advertising. Retail Blue book prices are generally extremely high (there by making the dealers price look really good), and trade in values are generally low (making the dealers trade offer look good). There are many books that dealers use, our dealership uses NADA guides and compares it to MMR (Manheim Market Report, a program that gives auction sales information for the past 6-8 weeks.

Problem with Thunderbirds is due to their rarity, often MMR doesn't have lots of sales to base on. Your market is very likely very different than ours, so I hate to give you advice. I can tell you NADA pricing is online, and in our market, it used to be that Loan value was what the dealer would pay to buy a car, and Trade value was roughly what it was expected to sell for. Thats been out the window the last few years (pricing all over the place) and thats whats led to the use of the auction prices to determine wholesale values.

I can tell you that there hasn't been any 04's sold in the Hawaii market recently accordiong to MMR. There was a Silver one with 82,348 miles sold in Darlington for $12,900 and a Maroon one with 102,047 sold for $9600 (So Cal) (but was listed in below average condition.) This is what dealers paid for the cars, not what they sold them for, dealer markup will vary.

Everyone, pay attention to that. He is right! Just for sport I ran a NADA on a NADA site for dealer use. I use this to book cars when I call them in for financing. The 04 TBird with 95,000 comes up this way:

$13,350 Clean Trade
$16,950 Clean Retail

Those are for IL, add $100 for HI. In any event, those figures don't guarantee what the car will bring if you put it on the market.


Lou
[Finance Manager at a Ford Dealer]

[steelblue5505]

Re: Blue Book Value?

Thanks Lou for that information straight from a Ford Dealer. It is great to have knowledge & experience step in and educate the second guessers.