Vehicle Valuation Series: Kelly Blue Book

Photo via Shutterstock

Kelly Blue Book is a great place to start figuring out what your car is worth.

Just remember: they are not always dead-on accurate. If you have a specialty (e.g., low volume) vehicle, or a vehicle that has certain regional significance (like Audi in New England or Subaru in the Pacific Northwest), sometimes their data doesn’t fully encompass the market. However, you will almost always get something in the ballpark of what the car is worth—a good starting place.

How does KBB determine values?

Kelly Blue Book uses a proprietary system, so no one really knows. However, there seems to be a consensus that KBB is looking at advertised prices, not transaction data. This is why most pundits think that their figures are usually inflated.

Investopedia has a great wiki on the subject here.

An example

Let’s use my sister-in-law’s Honda Civic from our last post.

At KBB.com, we can enter the license plate to get relevant trim info. We’ll then guess a condition (I tend to undershoot this to look at worst case situations for clients). In this case I selected “good,” since there is some clear coat rot and backseat staining/damage from her two dogs.

I’d recommend pricing with standard equipment, as most cars at this price point did not have many add-ons outside of what the trim level gives (i.e., EX, DX, SI, etc.).

So we get a private party value from the high 6,000s to low 8,000s:

Next time, we’ll look at some places in the market for relevant comps to see how this measures up.