Pricing from the dealer's side of the table
How dealers price and value used cars: a pricing playbook.
Consumer valuation tools tell a seller what their car is "worth." A dealer needs the opposite discipline: what can I buy this at, what will it cost to make it ready, what will it sell for, and how long will my money sit in it. Price a car well and it turns quickly at a healthy margin. Price it on a hunch and it becomes dead stock. This is the dealer-side pricing logic, laid out.
The four numbers behind every price
Buy price, cost to ready, sale price, days in stock.
Every used-car price is really a bet on four numbers. A dealer who tracks them per car prices from evidence; one who does not prices from memory and hopes.
- Buy price — what you actually paid at procurement, negotiated against real resale demand for that model.
- Cost to ready — inspection, refurbishment and reconditioning, so the "cost" of the car is the true landed cost.
- Sale price — set for a healthy margin at a speed the market will actually pay, not a wish.
- Days in stock — the silent cost. A car sitting 90 days at a bigger margin can earn less than one turned in 20.
Pricing is an inventory problem
You can only price well if you can see your stock honestly.
Good pricing is not a spreadsheet you build once — it is knowing, at a glance, the real cost and age of every car on the floor. That is exactly what inventory tracking gives you: refurbishment costs recorded job by job on each car, days-in-stock counting on their own, and slow movers surfacing before they become dead stock.
See how the stock view works in inventory management for pre-owned dealers, and how margin billing depends on the same numbers in the GST margin-scheme guide.
Talk to us
Pricing cars on gut feel? See what tracking the four numbers does.
Tell us how you decide a price today, and we will show you where Kenro keeps each car's buy price, refurbishment costs, asking price and days on the lot.