CAP has launched Black Book Live, a real time used car valuation
system that publishes trade price changes as soon as they are
identified, claiming it removes uncertainty about vehicle values
between publication dates of traditional monthly price guides.

A brief commentary explaining the rationale behind the change
will also be published at the same time.

However, CAP said it was “extremely unlikely” that values would
change daily, adding that “valuations will only be adjusted when
sufficient evidence is gathered [by CAP editors] from the
marketplace to provide a sound basis for changing the published
valuation for a vehicle”.

Much of CAP’s pricing evidence comes from ‘raw transaction’ data
at auctions, which it uses as a basis for further investigation,
rather than a basis for automatic adjustments. CAP maintains that
it requires a clear understanding of the disposal circumstances,
including vehicles’ conditions and specifications, and volumes at
individual sales, before it can adjust a published price.

CAP chief editor Chris Crow said: “Today’s market demands the
most accurate and timely valuation information possible. The
elephant in the room for the traditional monthly guides is that
they are inevitably out of date as soon as the market moves in
either direction.

“Analysis of ‘real world’ trading conditions reveals that even
where values change little on a month-to-month basis, the real-time
dynamic of the market can see variations in values of several
percentage points at different stages in a given month. This can
amount to several hundred pounds.

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“Black Book Live offers genuine insight into those subtleties in
a way which will enable dealers to improve their profit per unit
and fleet disposers to maximise their returns.

“Nonetheless, a fully independent monthly pricing benchmark will
remain important to many operators across the automotive sector.
The good news for those customers is that Black Book Live will
enable a much later ‘snapshot’ of the market to be taken for the
regular Black Book publication than our previous deadline process
allowed.”