How Car Offers Are Calculated

A fair offer isn't a guess. It combines real market data with the specifics of your car to produce a fair, current number.

What goes into the number

• Live wholesale and retail market data for your exact vehicle
• Your year, make, model, and trim
• Mileage and condition
• Regional demand: what your car is worth in this market, not a national average

The cars that are genuinely hard to price

Two kinds of vehicle resist a straightforward number. Classics do, because they barely trade in the wholesale market at all: a 1956 anything goes to a collector rather than being priced off recent comparable sales. Brand new cars do too, because manufacturer and dealer incentives move what people are actually paying in a way the resale data lags behind.

Why the offer is below the sticker on the lot

The most common objection to any offer is that the same car is listed for thousands more a few blocks away. Both numbers are real; they are just not the same number. A listing is a retail price, and it carries reconditioning, warranty, paperwork and the months the car may sit before it sells. An offer is a wholesale price, paid today.

Lars Sahlen spent thirty years in the trade, fifteen of them at CarMax as a sales manager, service manager and finally operations manager. His account of the gap is that a lot has reconditioning cost in the car and a good deal else besides, and is selling at retail while buying at wholesale. Those are two different jobs with two different numbers, and only one of them is an offer.

That is not a quirk of one business. It is how the whole trade is structured, and there is a saying inside it: you do not make the money on a car when you sell it, you make it when you buy it. That is why a wholesale number can be firm and fair at the same time.

An offer is a number. An asking price is a wish.

The other comparison worth being careful with is between an offer and what you hope to get privately. One of those is money on the table today; the other is a number you have not been paid yet, and may not be. An offer is somebody committing to the deal. An asking price is a wish.

Lars watched that play out for three decades from the appraisal desk: sellers turned an offer down, listed the car themselves, and came back a few weeks later having found that nobody was paying the asking price either. Weighing the two fairly means discounting the private number by the time, the risk and the chance it never arrives.

Getting the most accurate offer

Accurate details produce an accurate offer, so share your mileage and condition honestly and have your VIN handy when you can, since it pins down the exact trim and options. Your offer is then confirmed with a quick inspection before you're paid.