How to Use Comparable Car Values to Appraise a Classic Car

Video Transcript

"Alright I have taken a close look at the car I’m appraising, maybe I spent a half hour looking at it maybe an hour and a half. I’ve gotten good and greasy, I’ve gotten in the engine department, checked the engine made sure the numbers on it were right, got underneath the car to take a close look, I’ve been all over the car now what do I do? Well I need to find out what these kind of cars are selling for, so the first thing I do is I go into my computer I have all kinds of databases available to me that some of them are available to you too but I pay lots of money for this information. So I go in and say alright I have a particular car, I try to find as many of those cars as possible that have sold and I try to be as specific as I can. When I’m appraising a mustang for example, there are a lot of Mustang’s out there and I can find tons and tons and tons of sales on 65, 6, 7, 8 on through about 1970 Mustang’s, the information is readily available. If you have a 1939 LaSalle it may not be as readily available but it’s my job to go out there and find comparables and how do you establish what’s a comparable? Well the first thing you do is you find that automobile and then you, there’s usually descriptions that are reliable as far who has gone out and looked at the car and enter this information in the databank as far as the condition of the car, so you have say your subject car is in excellent condition and you’re finding comparable cars that are in excellent condition also and you start seeing a pattern, maybe that 39 LaSalle you managed to find six or eight of them that sound similar to the subject car and they’ve all been selling in the 42 to 57 thousand price range or you’re starting to get a handle on the value and then you compile all these in the report, you write down in the report what the differences are between those cars and the subject car, what they have what the subject car doesn’t have or what they don’t have that the subject car does have and you get all this information and from this the value starts becoming apparent and you look at all the comparables, you’re looking at the car, you look for price guides also to see what other people think the car is worth. Sometimes I contact people that actually make their living restoring General Motor products, the Ford products or the Chrysler products and say hey I’ve got this particular car, what’s your experience with it, have you been holding any sales, what do you think the car is worth? You take all that and kind of put it in a big pot and start cooking and rising from that the so the value start becoming apparent to you, you go well this really all things take into consideration this particular car looks to me like it’s worth $50,000 or whatever that particular car statistics are saying, so you put all that in the report and what does the report look like, well I’m going to show one to you."