joe_padavano

I've spoken out in the past against the validity of old car price guides. Here's one example of why I feel this way. I was looking at the NADA class car price guide on line since it was used in an ebay ad to justify the price. Check this NADA guide for a 1972 442 and you'll find that one of the engine options given is the six cylinder, along with a 10% decrement to value if so optioned. Well, not only was a six not available in the 442 that year, it was not available in ANY 1972 Oldsmobile!

Olds64

Interesting.

wmachine

Better yet, here are the adds for a '67 442

330/310 HP V8 Engine 15%
330/320 HP V8 Engine 15%
4 Speed Transmission 5%
400/350 HP V8 Engine 10%
425/365 HP V8 Engine 20%
425/375 HP V8 Engine 15%
6 Cylinder Engine -10% -10%
Air Conditioning 5%
W-30 Package 25%

Now *there* are some figures you can really trust!

bulldog

I don't know where they get their information,but I never did trust those guides.They tend to over price junk and underprice the good stuff.

joe_padavano

See, I would expect the one-of-none 330 and 425 engines to be worth more than the 400 due to rarity.

aliensatemybuick

Never-offered engine options aside, I never bought the minimal premium such guides place on 4 speed cars. All other things being equal, I would expect to pay a hefty premium on say a' 65 Buick GS convertible with a 4 speed vs an auto (that is, if I could even find one).

agtw31

all those price guides are garbage.

wjustinmartin

I don't know that I believe the guides are garbage, but they are just that - guides. I think it is a good jumping off point for establishing a ballpark value. After all, at the end of the bargaining, it is worth what you as a buyer are willing to pay a willing seller.

jaunty75

Of course they're not garbage. I just love all these knee-jerk, hop on the bandwagon, uninformed arguments against them.

They're not PREDICTIVE, and they don't pretend to be. They're based on what cars have ALREADY SOLD FOR. They're AVERAGES. They're reporting on events that have already happened. Arguing with the values in a price guide is like arguing with the weatherman over what the high temperature was yesterday. It's already happened!


One guy has a nice condition car that he sells, willingly, to a willing buyer for $5,000. Another guy has the same car in the same condition that he sells, willingly, to a willing buyer, for $10,000. An old cars price guide takes these numbers and reports that the average value of this car in this condition is $7,500.

Guy #1 sees this and argues, "that's nonsense, I couldn't get anywhere near that for my car! That price guide is JUNK!" Guy #2 sees this and argues, "that's nonsense, I got WAY more than that for my car! That price guide is JUNK!"

So who is right? Guy #1, Guy #2, or the price guide?

The answer: THEY ALL ARE! The price guide doesn't tell you what any particular car WILL sell for. It only tells you average values of what similar cars HAVE sold for.

If knowing yesterday's high temperature helps in predicting what today's high temperature will be, then it's worth keeping a record of yesterday's temperatures. Ditto for car selling prices.

OLD SKL 69

Yes I agree. I have only used them as a guide, not the rule. They are chock full of errors, but at least they give you a starting point.

Oldsguy

Because of this thread I was reviewing the only historical Olds book I have and reading about engines for each year model and found something interesting. In the early 30s Oldsmobile made an engine called an 8 Vee, about 225 cubic inch displacement with mechanical lifters and an "automatic" carburetor. Now my question is, was this a V8 engine as we know it today? I would love to know.

70 cutlass s

The people that make the price guide good chance are not old enough to know what 72 442 is. Plus I doubt if they have ever turned a wrench in their life. So I wouldn't trust what they had to say. A good example is a pastor of a local church before he started working in the church he was an automotive engineer for GM in the early 80's. His car needed to be worked on so he called me. He couldn't tell me anything about what was wrong with it. He was clueless. He knows nothing about cars but GM hired him because he has engineering degree. The only thing I asked him when I was done was that I wanted to know what he had designed on GM car in the early 80's so the next time I hurt my self working on one I would know if he was to blame. He didn't think that was funny.

jaunty75

This may be true of the NADA price guide, which caters much more to the late-model used-car market, but I doubt it's true of price guides dedicated to older and collector cars. The authors of such a publication might not be old enough to have been around when a '72 442 was new, but they certainly would know what a '72 442 IS. It's their job to be knowledgeable about such things, or their publication wouldn't last long.

Jamesbo

In the academia it's referred to as "Publish or Perish"

I'm not so sure the quality of the material is really important.

joe_padavano

So how many 1967 442s with the 330 motor were in their database to develop that percentage increase?

MN71W30

I looked up my 2 dr post 65 Biscayne on the Old car price guide and it seemed real low, I bet it's comparable to a 72 Amc Matador 4 dr. The 60's Chevy post cars are worth some money.
I talked to a guy that said his 69 Hurst Olds was appraised at 60K, it sounded like a #3 condition car at best, so he wants 60k.
The Old car price guide showed it worth around 20k in a #3 condition and around 45k in a #1. The guide can be useful as a tool, but nothing beats a little homework on your own.

jaunty75

I don't think this is a terribly relevant comparison. Academic journals make their money in an entirely different way. They do it by subscription sales to institutions such as libraries and so forth as well as by charging authors or their institutions page charges. They don't make any money through over the counter sales at a newsstand. They can make money without selling a single issue, and they don't really need or likely have much way of measuring how many of their issues actually get read by anyone. They have a market based on what you say, the fact that people in academia need to PUBLISH in order to survive.

In the old cars (or old anything) price guide world, it's completely different. The information presented is NOT coming from a multitude of sources who are each PAYING to get their information published, and the authors most certainly DO care if the publication gets read because the ONLY way they can make money is through subscription or newsstand sales. If their information is found to be inaccurate, they will lose sales and go out of business. The Old Cars Price Guide is 30 years old this year. They must be providing a service of value to someone.

jaunty75

Again, you're misconstruing what a price guide is versus an appraisal, which, in the end, is just someone's GUESS as to what a particular car WILL sell for. He is certainly is basing that appraisal on what similar cars have sold for as any professional appraiser would. He might be right. He might be wrong. But why does his value have more validity than that in the guide? Because it's higher? That's just wishful thinking at work. Again, the guide's values are AVERAGES of what HAS sold, not a prediction as to what a specific car will sell for tomorrow. This appraiser is talking about one particular car.

jaunty75

I don't know. How many are in your database?

Write to them and ask.

MN71W30

I think you've misconstrued my misconstuation. I was only pointing out the difference in the two. Thats why I said to do your homework on your own.

jaunty75

Sorry!

wmachine

I think it is quite obvious that even though they may have data on actual sales, the figures are definitely *not* sales actual prices.
There is no way that every single make and model has recent sales (let alone with the embarrassingly inaccurate options), yet every one has a price, those without sales can be nothing more than a guess.
And in the real world, recent sales any given time period for 2-door sedans could have resulted in higher prices than for 2 door hardtops. But the value guides *always* show a 2-door hardtop valued higher.
What this all means is that the figures *cannot* be a data base of actual sale. They have to be someone's guess. Call it an educated guess based on *some* kind of data, but a guess never the less.
But to those of us that have been following the values of the segment of cars we are familiar with for more than 20 years, the level of "education" in the educated guess in severely lacking to be of any value to us.
As I've said before, the more mainstream the car is, the more accurate and useful the value guide information is. Oldsmobiles are not in the mainstream when it come to value guides.

joe_padavano

Exactly ZERO, which makes it tough to assign a value for something that never existed.

70 cutlass s

It comes down to this a car is only worth what a buyer is willing to give for it. If it's your car and you spent a lot of time and money on it than it is priceless. Yes they may know what a 72 442 is, but unless they owned one, drove one, or worked on one than they wouldn't appreciate it.

jaunty75

This is a supremely important point. For all my speechifying above about the value of these price guides, I do recognize that they can't possibly have recent sales information for every vehicle in every condition for which they carry a listing. The OCPG lists values for cars going back to the 1930 model year. How many 1931 Graham 6-cylinder Phaetons were sold in the two months since the previous issue of the price guide came out? I would guess zero. Yet they show values for this car in all six condition levels. So where do those values come from? Certainly some are from whatever sales data they do have, and they most likely extrapolate over time for inflation and so forth when they don't have recent sales data. But, as was pointed out, it is a starting point. As you point out, the more mainstream the car, the more modern the car, the more samples OF the car out there, the more of them that are sold, the more likely the data is to be close to true market conditions. One reads these guides with this in mind.

jaunty75

People say this all the time, but it's trivial because it doesn't help someone looking to sell a car to determine a beginning asking price, and it doesn't help a potential buyer to know what the general market is for the car he's interested in.

In the END, yes, what you say is true, but you have to START somewhere.


Yes, but as I buyer, I'm not stupid. I'm not going to pay more for your car than the cold, hard world says it's worth just because you are in love with it. The idea is that if I can't buy it from you for a reasonable price, I'll buy it from someone else. The price guide tells me what a ballpark price range is for your car, and if you see it as god's gift to mankind and price it accordingly, fine. I'll look forward to buying it from your estate.

joe_padavano

And here we're in complete agreement.

wmachine

I think it helps to understand the origin of the NADA "blue book". For those that don't know, the National Automobile Dealers Association gathered sales data to be able to establish a "book value" on late model cars to help dealers with trade-in and used car values. In earlier days these were the only such databases. And there was (and still is) a large enough base of actual sales date to make the book values meaningful.
But they branched out into the collector car arena, and due to the significant differences in the ground they're trying to cover, and the data they have to work with, the results are significantly less useful.

jaunty75

Why, how very kind of you!

joe_padavano

:d :d :d

70 cutlass s

It comes down to this a buyer or seller should do their homework on values and know what the condition of the car is before they can come up with an educated price. I sorry that you took my words as cold they where not meant that way. As person that is restoring a Cutlass it would be hard for me to put a price on it, but as we know everything has a price and no matter what I thought it was worth. It would only be worth what other Cutlass in similar shape are going for.

cutlassgal

:d :d :d


Sorry to change the subject, but does anyone know why these "ditto D's" have not been turning in to big grins like they were before??? Just curious... ok back to your blue book thread!

mugzilla

We (442s') are in an interesting situation in that there are recent sales of #1 cars .

mugzilla

...

mugzilla

:d ...

jaunty75

You are right.

A mistake that I see many sellers make is that they assume that the rest of the world will see their car as they see it, including all the labor and love and history that went into it, instead of recognizing that, in spite of this, they have to see the car the way the rest of the world does. I'm guessing many more cars would sell more quickly if sellers kept this in mind.

A perfect example is this past summer, before I bought the '67 Delta and was looking around. A young woman was wanting to sell her '66 F-85 four-door that had been in the family since new. It was a very plain-jane car with about 90,000 miles on it, but the interior was in excellent shape, and the engine and exterior looked like they could a little work to clean them up and bring back some originality under the hood. But it was a solid, restorable car worth, I thought, around $2,500. (And, yes, I based that on the Old Cars Price Guide!!)

Well, this car was HUGELY with a capital H sentimental to this woman because it had been originally purchased by her uncle who had given it to her before he died about 10 years ago, and she kept it all these years partially as a legacy to him. She now wanted to sell the car as she felt that she couldn't care for it properly, and her father wanted it out of his garage so he could use the space for other things. But she felt that the one-family ownership must count for something, and I told her that it would as maintenance records could, for the most part, either be produced or described, but that, in the end, what sells or not is the car itself.

In spite of my asking her several times, she would not name a price. Rather, she wanted me to make an offer. After giving it a test drive and looking it over, I went home, thought about it some, consulted the OCPG, took a bath, sprinkled some potions and powders around the house, ate a peanut butter sandwich, walked the dog, and then called to offer her $2,000. I assumed we might ultimately settle for something in the mid-$2,000 range, and I might have been willing to go as high as maybe $2,700 or $2,800. Well, she wasn't interested. She still wouldn't tell me what she wanted for it, but I noticed it on craigslist a day or two later with an asking price of $4,000. I thought to myself, good luck.

About a month later she emailed me to ask if I would consider buying it for $3,000. By then I had bought the '67 and was no longer interested, and I wished her luck. This was in late July. I noticed that the car was still for sale at the Mid-Ohio Chapter Olds Club show in Columbus in late September, but there was no price on it.

The moral of this story is, if she had priced the car using her head instead of her heart, it would be in my driveway now instead of hers, she would have gotten a fair price for it, and she would have the comfort of knowing that it went to a good home.

dantana

I guess instead of getting on here and trashing a company for making some mistakes you could contact them and help to correct it. They are trying to provide some helpful tools for those that don't have access to or knowledge of this information. They only represent themselves as a guideline to follow. The truth to any buying or selling of anything is that it is only worth what you can get for it. As for appraising a car for insurance purposes these values are only part of the equation in figuring out replacement costs. I would like to know how Joe would go about putting a value on a vehicle and then I would like a chance to critique his methods. I am sure you could find flaws in anything so use it for what its worth and enjoy yourself!

MN71W30

I do know some guys that will hold out for a high price even if it takes a couple years to sell it. I prefer to buy low and sell low. I paid 15k for an SS454 Chevelle that had been sitting outside for a few years. My 70 year old father thought I lost my mind. But I knew the car well and it was all original with paperwork. I had worked on the car and drove it several times before he let it sit. I sold it back to him a couple years later for 21k after alot of repair. I knew the Chevelle market well and didn't need to look in any magazine for a price.

jaunty75

That price is right in line with the OCPG. A '70 or '71 Chevelle SS454 in #4 condition is shown as having a value in the low $10,000s. That's an average, and certainly $15,000 falls into that range, especially if it might be considered a high end #4. Make it a #3 condition, and the average value rises to the high 20s to $30,000. You fixed yours up and got $21K for it. Maybe it was a #3, maybe it was between a #3 and a #4. The point is, your prices are consistent with the very average values shown in the book.

Of course, you're also talking about events that happened some time ago, maybe years, and you say that several years elapsed between when you paid the $15K and sold for $21K. Values vary over time, too.

No doubt some people can afford to wait to find just the right person to sell the car to. Others might not have the time. Just in the last few days, how many people have posted a car or some parts for sale on here because they lost their job or had their hours cut back? These people want to sell right now, not years from now. It's the average of ALL these sales, the guy who takes two years and the guy who takes two weeks, that make up the averages in the book.

mugzilla

could someone give me the "listed" price for a '70 442, auto, ac, pw,pdb,pdl,am/fm,bucket seat console.rally pac w/ tic toc, tilt , 109,000 miles documented ..?

As for the value I give it. It needs engine work on the original engine so I would value it at $10,000. As soon as it gets running( might as well detail the eng compartment and install a new wiring harness the value will go up 80% as I really enjoy driving it ...