Last Updated on February 17, 2024
Blue book pricing is all the craze right now, and many dealers will try to entice you by offering you blue book prices, or prices even lower than the blue book. The NADA Blue book is one of the most popularly used blue book and has been around for well over seventy years. NADA is short for National Automobile Dealers Association, and according to their spokesperson, the Blue book sales overshadows its competitors by a factor of 5.
This blue book uses over 500,000 data points when calculating the value of a vehicle. The NADA Blue Book Value of a car is generally regarded by most as an accurate and fair representation of the state and condition of the car.
The Blue Book uses several sources of information for value assessment that are not publicly available. Since the blue book was originally designed to be used exclusively by dealers, there are several data points that are never made public.
What is a Blue Book?
The term blue book is generally used to describe any book that contains statistical information. The Blue Book is a guide for advising dealers on what price they should buy a used car, and for what price they should sell it. It is considered a standard by many when it comes to buying used cars, and it is highly popular because of the strict clean trade-ins condition that the guide enforces. NADA Updates its blue book on a monthly basis and adds new information pertaining to the cars that were sold during that duration and the many details that go with it. The dealers who follow the Blue book value of a car, use this guide to assess the value of every used car before they buy or sell it. These transactions vary from one car model to another, and for every factor. The fact that NADA considers several thousand factors when evaluating a car makes it one of the most trusted methods of assigning a value to a used car.
Kelley Blue Book is another great resource for a variety of vehicles, and also has great pricing information for KBB Snowmobile values. If you are looking for RV's, the Kelley Blue book used RV values is an incredible tool.
Assigning value for used vehicles through empirical data on a national level
NADA, along with other popular Blue books, work by carefully collecting, examining and evaluating the car sale data all over the country. Every sale and purchase is recorded by the authorities and it is made available to NADA for the purpose of their Blue book. This information is then used by NADA to modify Blue book value pointers on a monthly basis.
It takes into account factors like auction transactions, retail sales data, and the asking price from classified listing websites. The huge amount of data collected by NADA for the purpose of calculating Blue Book value of every vehicle in the country, means that these prices follow national trends, and are uniform across the US.
This is one of the reasons why NADA does not provide valuation parameters for foreign made cars in its Blue book, since it lacks the empirical data to make such a calculation. NADA Blue book value is considered an official price today by a large number of dealers, and consumers, and through the use of this blue book, one can easily ensure a standard rate for any American made used car.
