One thing many valuation services lack is a large volume of data to work with: classic car sales are still mostly done privately, deciphering auction results is often difficult, and for those who have rare vehicles, just what price do you command for a unicorn, anyway?
For months, digital vehicle history platform Patina has been gathering pricing data of a different sort: what a classic is listed for when it’s put up for sale.
On the face of it, you may think it doesn’t tell you much—how are you supposed to know how much something is worth unless you know what someone paid for it? From the mindset of someone trying to price their vehicle competitively in the market, however, knowing what other vehicles are priced at allows you to make an educated guess at what your classic should sell for…if you ever decide to part with it.
Patina says of its new service: “Every month we gather more than 250,000 advertised car prices. We have been doing this since mid-2014 and have millions of price points in our database. We take this data and carry out some clever categorization and statistical analysis on it, including the removal of duplicates and outliers (those prices which are not typical of the overall data). This helps ensure that the data you see is the best representation of the market that is available.”
This is why, right up top, Patina is careful to say that it’s a “Price Trends” tool—is the market getting better or worse for a particular model?
So how do you access this data? Sign up for a Patina account, and the “Price Trends” section will be on the left sidebar once you’re logged in. Both Patina and the price data is free.
Source: Patina
Photos by Rémi Dargegen, Afshin Behnia, & Harald Atkinson
