Originally Posted by +fireamx
The "Black Book" is most every dealers bible when it comes to appraising a used car. A new book comes out every week, and is a compilation of several
"dealer auction" average prices for any given car in that area.
It's also regional, by that I mean, The prices a dealer has in their black book in Florida, will be different than one from the North East region.
When I had a used car lot here in the Akron area, and I purchased a vehicle at the auction for average Black Book value. I was almost guaranteed a profit by shipping it to Orlando Florida's dealer auction. Well that is, if I picked the right car that was currently popular down South.
Black Book had 4 pricing categories. Extra Clean, Clean, Average, and Rough. It also listed how much to add for most all popular options.
Not to beat a dead horse but that is what I said. Black book as others gets there prices from several auctions and regions (most of the auctions are Manheim). On the Manheim web site you can plug in the car and get a regional price or look at every auction sale price in the nation car by car. This is sorted by the day they ran. A book is a guide and even printed each week is not as accurate as the auction info that is as recent as 12 hours. Also if a Crossfire sold last week for 17K you are pretty safe at a little less than 17K trade in because you could run it to the auction and get that. Of course there are transportation fees auction selling fees too.