With COEs at a high, many car owners are thinking of selling their cars. Sell the car now and wait until COEs come down again before thinking of getting another car is a strategy that some are adopting.
Broadly speaking, you can either sell your car to another consumer like yourself or you could sell it to a dealer. The former allows you to maximise your gains but it can be time-consuming and tedious because of all the back-and-forth communication and paperwork involved. As a result, most people end up selling their cars to dealers.
One problem with the second method is that it's hard to know how much dealers would offer for your car because these figures are not publicly available. The numbers you see on popular portals like sgCarMart are prices that dealers or other car owners are asking for their cars and are therefore not indicative of what dealers are offering to buy your car.
Fortunately, Motorist is stepping in with their new Price Predicator feature. Powered by machine learning, Motorist's proprietary algorithms, and backed with the data of over S$900 million worth of vehicle transactions, the new Price Predicator feature is able to show users roughly how much they can expect dealers to offer for their cars.
Motorist claims it can offer a valuation that's accurate to within 5% for 90% of makes and models. Naturally, the more popular and common a car is, the more accurate the evaluation will be. For rarer cars and exotics cars, the margin of error will be higher – simply because there isn't that much data to work on.
I tested the feature using a BMW 2 Series 216 Gran Tourer and found the Price Predictor's estimate to be fairly reasonable. Looking at the prices of used 2 Series 216 Gran Tourers on sgCarMart, a depreciation of $13,772/year seems like a plausible offer.
However, using a much rarer BMW M2, I found the Price Predictor's estimate to dubious. It seems unlikely dealers are offering a depreciation of just S$14,453/year when used examples are going for over double on sgCarMart.
The feature is available only on their app and it requires users to enter the details of their cars so that the app can accurately retrieve data such as the registration date, COE value, and OMV. These data are taken into account to give users an estimation of what dealers would offer.
Furthermore, not only can the feature give you a real-time estimation, it can also show you historical data, allowing users to see the valuation and deprecation of their car and how it has changed over time. This can give users a better idea of whether it's the right time to sell their cars.
The Motorist app is available as a free download on the App Store and Google Play.
Keyword: Thinking of selling your car? Motorist's new Price Predictor will let you know roughly how much dealers would offer