joe_padavano

I stumbled over the Collector Car Price Tracker website today while looking for 64 VC parts. Apparently this is a searchable archive of ebay motors auctions that have actually resulted in cars being sold. I would consider this to be a very useful in answering "what's this car worth" questions and probably more accurate than the old car price guides that list options that weren't even available on a particular model. Enjoy.

jensenracing77

Very cool! can't ever have to many tools for this information. Sold completed listings on ebay with multiple bids was the best way I could find for this but many time there was nothing there for referance. This will be a great tool.

jaunty75

This is possibly useful and possibly not so much. I'm sure it's better on the cars that are more popular.

I just did a search on one of my cars, a '67 Delta 88 convertible. I did not specify convertible or anything like that. It returned "37 auctions that match your search." Sounds great. Except that it shows data for only two auctions when you click on any of the "select how to display auction results" boxes down below. No information (condition, body style, etc.) is given about the cars that sold nor of the dates of the sales.

When I try to narrow down the results by specifying the body style as "convertible" in the keywords box, I get 17 auctions that match my search, but zero of them are shown.

In short, this is not very useful, at least for me.

Also, speaking of "more accurate", the little box on the left side of the page that purports to give a little history of the car does have one small error, claiming that the 425 engine was introduced in 1964. No one is perfect, it seems.


Joe, you are one to constantly poo-poo the price guides. Fine. I am one who constantly posts what the Old Cars Price Guide says because I subscribe to it and I find it interesting. But I've never maintained that it or any source is the definitive answer to what a car is worth.

I list it because because people ask and because it's just another data point, like other price guides both online and printed, like services like the one you list above, and like what your buddy's buddy's buddy sold his identical car for three years ago. People can take or leave any of them.


Add on comment: I did see how to display all auction results, and if you hover over a data point, the auction title will pop up. So you can see how the seller described the car in the auction title, which is not necessarily the most objective description. However, they're all over the map in terms of price with still no way to see the car's condition.

sammy

Great link!

droptopron

I wonder if they filter for the same car being listed multiple times due to non-payers / shill bidders?

oldcutlass

I'll have to play with it some.

jaunty75

Interesting question. There's an auction going on right now that appears to be this. It's for a '73 98, and I posted it over in the For Sale section a few weeks ago.

It's a no- reserve auction, but it's been listed at least three times in the last few weeks. There is no reserve, so each time the auction ends, the car is apparently sold. Yet it keeps reappearing.


Auction ended May 5, apparently sold:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Oldsmobile-N...US_Cars_Trucks


Auction ended May 13, apparently sold:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Oldsmobile-N...US_Cars_Trucks


Current auction, ends May 31:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Oldsmobile-N...US_Cars_Trucks

GAOldsman

Jaunty that one may be a case of someone "padding" the price....

Joe seems like a cool link, but the old adage of "It's worth what someone is willing to pay for it" still stands IMO. I know of very few people that would actually buy a car outright just by a description and a few obscure pics without seeing it in person. Maybe if he incorporated the sales from www.autotraderclassics.com, craigslist and a few other well known sites it would be a bit more accurate for our cars.

For example a '69 AMX is listed between $12,199 for a fair condition car to $26,341 for an excellent condition car. That seems a bit high to me for a fair car and low for an excellent car. Another example would be a '72 Cutlass Supreme. There are no parameters where you can narrow the search to distinguish between hardtop, convertible, 455, 350, auto, manual, a/c and so on other than a keyword or two. The prices that showed up for that search were quite mediocre to say the least with a high fair condition price and a low excellent condition price ranging from $7,100 - $11,250.

jaunty75

But how would this information be gathered? I don't know about autotraderclassics, but certainly craigslist does not require sellers to disclose the final selling price of a car, or even that the car sold at all, when they take down an ad. So how could a selling price ever be determined? I'm guessing it's the same for autotraderclassics, any other online site or printed publication, and even your local newspaper.

The advantage to the ebay-tracking site posted by Joe is that it apparently really does collect final selling price information. But it assumes that the car actually changed hands when the auction ended. The site also, as noted, doesn't really do a very good job of presenting auction results in any really useful way. Plus, I noticed that the site tracks sales back to 2005 in the examples I looked at. That's good for historical trends, but does it really do you much good in determining the value of a car in 2014 using selling data from nearly 10 years ago?

joe_padavano

Huh? I just duplicated your search, got the same 17 auctions, and for the more recent ones, there are PDFs of the ebay screen shot. Here's one. (warning - it's 64 Meg!)

I'll also point out that these 17 completed auctions pretty much all fall in the $5k - $10K range. NADA says the same car with a 425 has a low retail of $11,820, an average of $26,280, and a high of $45,480.

Sorry, but there's no 67 D88 convertible on the planet that's ever sold for $45K. We can agree to disagree, but the facts speak for themselves. (Plus, NADA still offers the option of a W30 package on this D88 convertible... )

jaunty75

I tried to download one of these but gave up after a few minutes as nothing seemed to be happening. I guess I didn't wait long enough. But there ought to be some other option besides downloading a document that large to get the needed information.

I'm not disagreeing with the values shown on this site, and I've long maintained that values from the NADA site are off by a factor of two to three.

My complaint with this site is that the values are not sorted in any useful way.


This site, in my opinion, is no better and no worse than any of the other old car value sources. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, and this is just one more to add to the arsenal.

joe_padavano

For other models, the info is sometimes contained on the basic auction web page. Keep in mind that keeping track of this info must be a HUGE effort for somebody, and we're getting access to it for free. I'm sure whoever is putting time into this is prioritizing more popular models, but the fact that you can get PDFs of the completed auction web page is a MAJOR benefit. If you search completed auctions on ebay, you typically only get 30 days or so. The fact that this info goes back a decade is valuable. Maybe prices from 2005 are not that relevant today, but the historical trend IS relevant. More importantly, if you are talking about a less popular car (say, a 1962 F-85 station wagon, for example), there just aren't that many data points available, so I'll take all the data I can get. How NADA or other old car price guides can offer prices with four or five significant figures is a mystery to me (actually, no it isn't, it's just meaningless extrapolation).

I also agree that one has to be wary of cars that are "sold" on ebay and relisted two weeks later. I frequently bring this up when I suggest people search completed auctions. From the few samples I've checked on this web site, they appear to have weeded those out. On the other hand, there is still some spurious data. For example, I checked 69 H/Os. There's a completed auction where a "numbers matching" car sold for $6,900. I don't believe that for a minute.

OldSoldier

I bought my car on ebay last year and it doesn't show up.

D. Yaros

All this discussion of "What's My Car Worth" has to have Keith Martin drooling. Why, obviously, that is the name of his television show, but the database being referenced is also a property of the same Keith Martin.

joe_padavano

OK, I'll be the first to admit a mistake. I THOUGHT this was going to be a useful tool for determining value.

Apparently not. I came across these two "closed" auctions for the same car a month apart. Same VIN, same ad, same photos, same location, same phone numbers, two different seller names (like that matters...), two different prices, one a "numbers matching" 350, the other a "numbers matching" 455.

Apparently info from this site is also suspect.

http://collectorcarpricetracker.com/.../170871406459/

http://collectorcarpricetracker.com/.../170894021034/

Koda

I normally go with the old car price guide value, and also what I think based on experience. I notice that I consistently rate care values about 25% high compared to a certain few people on here. However, this may be because, if you're hard up, or just a cheap bastage, this affects your world view and makes you underprice things. Or, I may be off myself.

While the adage of it's worth what someone will pay for it is nice, it's not really true. An item is worth what identical items which have sold in the recent past have, one average, sold for. Too many people see a transaction that had a sucker on one end, and they think they can get the same deal.

hullinger

I think it's very important to remember that the eBay price tracker, Hagerty price tracker, Old Cars... and others are just a guide. If you're not intimately familiar with the pricing of a particular vehicle than you've got to compare and contrast each guide than make a price assessment. Some cars are definitely more difficult than others to price assess but using various resources should at least get you within a reasonable price range for a vehicle.

Chris

Allan R

Annnnd?? You'd expect something like integrity from a flipper? (not the dophin either). I find it highly amusing and ironic that the car sold for 12K in July advertised with a 350, and 10K in August advertised with a 455. Typically flippers try to make, not lose money on sales....

Bernhard

The big question is the market soft?

joe_padavano

I thought it was a flipper at first, but when I actually looked at the PDFs, I think it's the same seller both times. The seller name is different on ebay, but the phone number in the ad is the same, as is the location. I don't think either was a sale. I think both are BS. 38 bids and the price is EXACTLY $12,000 (and EXACTLY $10,000 the first time after 16 bids)?

Allan R

In one month? Those sales were back in July and August 2012. IDK what the market conditions were for those sales, but it's hard to believe there was that much fluctuation in just 6 weeks.

joe_padavano

You begin to understand why I think both "sales" are BS.

oldcutlass

I don't depend on price guides, I listen to the voices in my head.

joe_padavano

I've found that humming the theme song to It's A Small World will drown those voices out.