What Affects Your Car's Value in Alberta

There is a real number and it is knowable. What makes it feel unknowable is that almost every price you can see is not it: the windshield price on a lot, the asking price on Marketplace, the figure somebody floated on a trade two years ago.

Here is what the number is actually built from, so you can land close to yours before anybody quotes you.

What number are you actually asking for?

Any offer you get for your car is a wholesale number. Market value is what a dealer can buy the same car for at auction. That is the definition the whole trade prices against. A lot price is a retail price, carrying reconditioning, any warranty the dealer attaches and the weeks the car sits there, which is why it is thousands higher and why none of that gap is yours to sell.

How the number gets assembled on our side is that article's whole subject.

Why does your car get compared to other cars?

Because nobody pricing your vehicle is asking what it is worth in isolation. They are asking what the same thing costs somewhere else this week, and for most cars the answer is not much more, with no waiting.

That comparison set is what caps the number. A genuinely unusual car, very low kilometres and kept exceptionally well, does stand out. Most are what the trade calls bread and butter and get priced against the others exactly like them.

Which three things set the number?

Kilometres, claims and condition. In our own pricing those three do nearly all the work and everything else is a refinement of them.

Kilometres are the blunt one. Past roughly 130,000 a car gets harder to sell, and harder to sell is the same thing as worth less. Where the bands actually sit is a question of its own.

Claims are priced on the dollar amount, not on the fact of an accident. A small fender claim and a repaired near write-off both read as an accident on a history report and they are nowhere near the same number, because what matters downstream is the size of the claim and what it does to the next buyer's financing. Status sits underneath that, and a Rebuilt car is a different order of value again. What a claim costs in dollars covers both, and is worth reading before you answer any questions about history.

Condition is the one sellers misjudge, because you see your car a piece at a time over years and a buyer sees all of it in about thirty seconds.

Trim and options move the number less than most sellers expect. Trim is looked up rather than argued over: your exact trim at your exact kilometres has its own valuation, and that is the line you are read against, not the base car and not the loaded one.

What is worth spending money on before you sell?

Almost nothing, and this is where sellers quietly lose the most. A new windshield, a fresh oil change and minor maintenance do not come back on an ordinary car, and often brakes do not either. People do that work hoping it adds $1,000 or $1,500 to the price, and it does not. A cracked windshield barely registers on the number unless the car is worth something like two hundred thousand dollars.

The exception is work you have already paid for. A folder of receipts is not maintenance, it is documentation, and it answers the question a buyer otherwise has to guess at, which is how the car was actually treated.

Does anything about Alberta change the number?

Less than you would hope, on the value itself. Alberta charges no provincial sales tax, and a private seller is not a GST registrant and cannot charge GST on the sale, so nothing is added on top of the price you agree. What the car is worth underneath that is set by the same three things anywhere would use.

Why is your number lower than the one in your head?

Usually because the number in your head did not come from a market. A listing tells you what one person hopes to get, not what anybody paid, and a single well priced Marketplace ad can have ten buyers competing over it, which pushes asking prices up without moving values at all.

The typical gap between what a seller expects and what a car is worth is five to ten thousand dollars. Occasionally it is far wider than that. It also tends to close on its own: people who are certain the market is wrong go and test it, and a week or two later most of them have arrived at the same number from the other direction. Testing it first is a perfectly reasonable way to find that out.

One thing that is not connected to any of this is what you still owe. A loan balance is an agreement between you and your lender and it has no bearing on what the car is worth. If you are on the wrong side of that, it is a normal sale with one extra step.

How do you get close to the number yourself?

1. 1Price your exact trim, not your model. Each trim at each kilometre reading carries its own valuation. A base car and a loaded one are two different vehicles to the people pricing them.
2. 2Treat every asking price as a ceiling. No Canadian consumer can look up what used cars actually sold for, which is why so many sellers end up anchored to listings. A listing is the most optimistic number ever attached to a car, and it is also the only one you can see.
3. 3Know your claim total before anyone else does. The dollar amount, not just that something happened, and if you do not have it your insurer does. Better at your kitchen table than in your driveway.
4. 4Subtract nothing for what you spent. Last month's brakes, the new windshield and the recent oil change are not in the number. Reading them into it is a common reason a seller believes an offer is unfair.

Do that and you will be reading the same numbers a buyer is reading. If you want the actual figure for your car rather than the range around it, that is what an offer is for. Once you have a number you believe, the rest of an Alberta sale goes quicker than most sellers expect.