Best Place to Determine Used Car Price/Value?

I can't give a really useful answer (being fairly new to car shopping in the US) but I've been looking at KBB.com, nadaguides.com and the Edmunds TruValue calculator. Somewhere in between the three you should be able to find a realistic price.

NADA is usually high. KBB private party is reasonably accurate (not retail).

Craigslist. I look at 10 or so cars and get a very good idea of what they are worth. Disregard cream-puffs (unless yours is) and crap-cans (unless yours is) and you have a fair market value.

I used NADA, KBB, and Edmunds for an estimate on a '97 M3 Sedan I looked at... they were all around $4500 for a car in really great shape. Nowhere near real market value, but I guess its harder to gauge for "special" cars.

Black Book, NADA, & KBB

Here is the site I use.

Black Book is what dealers use. FWIW.

For PP I take The average between Retail and Trade In(wholesale) and use that. That is how KBB gets their values.

KBB is smoking crack. I'm selling my 03 Sonoma ZQ8 right now. I bought it in July and the KBB Private Party value at that time was $6800. Now when I look it up it says its worth $8300 with 8000 more miles on it.

One of my tools I use is to go to Ebay, search for your vehicle, then click "Completed Listings." It will show you what they sold for.

I agree KBB is on the pipe hard.

Rarely accurate and never up to date. They are so late in their recording of a heavily west coast biased info that convertibles peak in winter!

I like Black Book and know where they get their values. Nice to be able to compete with dealers on their own turf.

I find ebay prices sketchy. Sometimes they are way low and sometimes they are two high. Never seen them compare to actual purchases. IME

I never bother with KBB, but I've had decent luck with www.edmunds.com

All the guides suck. I have a system.

I search "any distance" on Autotrader for my year, make and model. When you get the results, it shows the highest and lowest listed prices as well as an average listing price. I figure that gives me a good idea of a fair asking price and maybe 5-10% below that is a good actual transaction price.

Maybe it's where you live, but in my area kbb.com darn near always matches our mega-expensive "market survey" we use in insurance settlements. Even though my state doesn't recognize it for insurance purposes, I steer people towards it if they want to get a basic idea of their car's value.

What I usually find when someone is way off with a price they got on kbb.com is they didn't use it right. You have to use "private party" value and fill the rest out as accurately as possible. Most folks use retail in the (mistaken) belief that is a selling price. It isn't.

Zombie thread!

Does anyone have something new to use? Both KBB and Edmunds seemed to changed their websites and made them next to useless... especially with MINI's where the options can be so diverse. The Black Book site mentioned above is also woefully inadequate (not enough option choices) for estimating the value on a JCW MINI.

Basically: I've found a car I'm interested in, but the price seems a tad on the high side but I can't find anything accurate to back up that hunch. Since I'd need to take out a loan to buy the car, I need to be able to estimate how much the bank would think it's worth (loan amount).

(edit: the nadaguide link in the first post seems pretty good - I guess that'll ahve to be my go-to site from now on)

I use the realtor method. I find "comps" on Craigslist, Ebay, Autotrader, etc. Try to find as many similar cars as you can and see what people are asking. I make a spreadsheet so that I can then find the average, sort by price, etc.

In my experience, KBB and the like are essentially useless.

In reply to Tom_Spangler:

That's fine when looking for a relatively common car, but it gets a bit harder when the car is less common. For example, there are grand total of ten 2006 factory JCW cars on Autotrader in the entire country and only one without a sunroof (the one I'm considering). None at all on eBay or CL.

I don't expect the number to be dead-on accurate (guide prices on MINI's never have been), but I'd like to at least get a reasonable ball-park figure.

+1 for what Tom Spangler said. KBB & friends are pretty much useless for finding "street" value once the car is more than a few years old.

just use the Chumpcar value you list LOLz

Pretty sure THIS is the best place to go to if you want to find out the TRUE value of your vehicle.