When I joined CAP 16 years ago, I never dreamed I would one day say this…
Monthly values soon go out of date. There, I said it. Because it’s true.
You are welcome to check for yourself. We produce the monthly data by taking a snapshot of our research database sometime around the end of the 3rd week in the month. This means that by the time you take a fresh look at your data at the start of the month it’s about a week old.
Many values have already moved. We’re certain of this because we decided some time ago to look into it.
By the end of the month you’re therefore looking up car values that were last researched five weeks ago (and at CAP we pride ourselves in releasing our data later than anyone else, so for others it’s about six weeks old).
We absolutely appreciate that sometimes this isn’t a problem for the savvy professional. We’re not so naive to think dealers rely entirely on us to tell them what’s happening to car values. But there are certainly times when it is impossible to keep up with the ebb and flow of the market. Remember 2008? Or the beginning of 2009?
The reality is that the used car market continues to evolve and pressures continue to rise on profit per unit, so we took the decision that we would introduce a genuine real-time trade pricing tool (although it took some very fine brains indeed to actually build it) for those who didn’t want the risk of relying on out-of-date values.
And that’s where Black Book Live comes in. It tells you what cars are selling for right now – not what they were selling for last time we pulled millions of pieces of monthly research data.
In today’s fast –moving environment I want information that is current, so if I was buying or selling cars, I’d definitely want to know what the market says they’re worth right now, not one, two, three or four weeks ago.
We like to think our ‘little’ Black Book is a well known brand, but, as a business tool, it’s a long way behind the curve compared with Black Book Live and in the end, aren’t we all here to be successful in business?
Mike Hind - Communications Manager
mike.hind@cap.co.uk
The true cost of monthly data
With approximately 60% of values changing throughout the course of the month, the table below offers a small snapshot of the effect across some of the popular manufacturer models on many forecourts today where the ‘Live’ value clearly shows a marked change in car value, leaving the monthly value quickly out-of-date.
