Welcome back to the vehicle valuation series, where I show you our method of valuing cars for sale and for storage insurance. We’re using my sister-in-law’s Honda Civic as an example to move through the process of figuring out your car’s listing price.

To recap, last time we showed you how to use KBB to value your car, why it is helpful, and some pros and cons of using that method. While KBB can put you in the ballpark and keep some reasonable guardrails on your ask, they are often a little off base in their value assessment.

The best way to figure out what a car is worth is to see what others have sold it for, or at least what they have been listed for. The best options for this are Ebay and Autotempest.

Ebay

Ebay is great because you can actually see what a car has sold for. It’s one of the few places you can actually do this. After entering your car’s make, model, and year in the search box, scroll down until you get to this group of items:

Then check the “sold listings” box. This will ONLY bring up closed listings that have sold. Here was a section of the results from my Civic search:

At the time of this search, there were not many sold vehicles listed. Generally, Ebay is great for late model and collector vehicles. There aren’t a ton of 7+ year old used cars, but you can find some.

Something else I wanted to call our here is the duplicate car. Many times, people will bed and not pay for the car that they win on Ebay. There is very little recourse when bidders do this, so it’s common practice on high dollar items. You’ll want to be mindful of the most current auction’s closing price for that same car.

In the above screenshot, the brown car is a very low-mileage example at $11,000. If you remember from the last post, KBB valued our car between $6,000 and $8,000. Given that a very low-mileage example is $3,000 more, this checks out. We’re on the right track.

Next, we’ll look at some ads via Autotempest and learn how that process works.

Vehicle Valuation Series: Comps — Ebay

Ebay