johhende

Hello from Houston! I'm a big car guy and I daily a manual trans convertible 330i ZHP and I'd thought I would share this with you all. I wrote a program to web scrape and plot curves for car values. This makes searching for cars so much faster and easier, and you can tell where the value lies. Would you pay for a report to help with your car search? These plots are fully interactive will include the exact link where these cars can be found. You also get valuable insights about depreciation and make/model year changes. This one is only for 911s, but you get the idea. I can also run this on two separate cars to compare and contrast models. Super handy. I can also calculate premiums for manual transmissions and other options. Let me know what you all think! If there is interest, I may make a site to host these on.

All Manual Transmissions

All Manual Transmissions

Zylinderkopfdichtung

Hello! I lived in Houston for 17 years and have a 330i ZHP sedan!

I’ve thought about what you’re doing many times. I think it has real merit. Kudos.

johhende

Thanks! It really saves an enormous amount of time. I also output the raw to excel. That way I can compile time series of the curves to watch the market correct in the next 6-18 months. I'll be in the market for a Macan or I may hold out for a CPO electric Macan. Setup takes me about 1 min, and running it takes about 5 min. Way better than scrolling forever.

Tier1Terrier

Very cool.

desmotesta

Very Cool and great Idea.

I would add that instead of paying for a singular report, I would be more interested in a paid member site where I can pull reports on cars I am looking to buy or sell or just research.

I would be willing to pay $29-$39 a month for something like this, gives the user a month to research their perspective BUY or SELL and saves a tons of time researching individual sites and/or cars.

spdracerut

Nice! On the graph with the trendlines, could you try a moving average line?

911-TOUR

What is your data source?

shammerman

@johhende Is this based pn asking prices or actual sales data?

vanlieremead

I did this manually when researching my Boxster. Similar story. I like the your stacked points. I used a pivot table and the average function.

johhende

Thanks for the comments!


Data source is Autotrader Asking Prices. I wrote a routine to scrape the data.

@desmotesta I have to run this routine manually right now (It is about a 30 second setup followed by a 1 hour routine, to prevent spamming the website too fast). What I may consider is to publish many more reports (And some that users request) along with the raw data to a paid subscription site to update at some time interval. Soon, I will add manual vs auto price spreads, and I will also add price curves over time. This way we can see the price correction as supply evens out. Also, I can build this to determine the premium for CPO cars. This will be useful for my Macan search. My goal is a CPO 2022 or CPO Macan electric when it comes out.

@spdracerut As far as the trendlines go, I can do that. it just depends on what interval I want to make the average on.

Here is another neat one. This is before I extended the lines all the way. Nissan Leafs have catastrophic depreciation from 0-30k miles. It really helps you see what an entry point could be, if you were interested in one. haha

I'll be running the Taycan soon.

Bxstr

Great work - thanks for sharing. Personally, I buy cars very infrequently. Due to this, I am ok spending the extra hours researching a fair value up front, researching cars across various websites and then buying the car once I find a deal that I think is fair given the condition of the car, even if that is slightly above market value. For some that are buying and selling frequently, or for dealers, I could see the value in them paying for a service like this if one does not already exist. Best of luck!

desmotesta

unfortunately sites like Autotrader/truecar/cargurus list "Manual Transmission" incorrectly, (mostly dealer misrepresenting facts for a click) which makes the "Manual transmission" filter almost useless.

Of the 3 pages of search results this morning, only 4 cars were really Manual and rest were PDK. Thats an HUGE margin of error and impossible to trust data based on those car sites. My 2 cents

vanlieremead

I found the same. You have to read into the description and understand what was available on the cars. The number of "speeds" is usually a give away but it's not automatic.

Bob in NY

Another helpful resource is www.classic.com They have a lot of market data along with available, sold and ASP by month and model.

911-TOUR

I'd be careful...their terms of service explicitly prohibit what you are doing.

https://www.autotrader.com/legal/visitor-agreement

"engage in any systematic extraction of data or data fields, including, without limitation, email addresses, by use of any automated mechanism, such web robots, crawlers, or spiders (except in strict conformance with the Robots Exclusion Protocol) or otherwise"

I've witnessed several legal actions in this space. It usually doesn't end well for the scraper. I'm just asking because I don't want to see a fellow Rennlister in that sort of mess. PM me if you want more info.

cheers!