Greetings leashakrs,
Thanks to your valuable input and advise, I decided to keep my 2021 GLC300 until better times, or until my lease expires in 2025.
While calling around and getting quotes from more than a dozen of dealers for the past 3 weeks, I noticed something odd: CarMax value of my car kept dropping, and the more I checked on it the faster it went down. I tried to check the value of a similar car (similar year , make and model), but it required me to put a license plate or vin number first. When I went to Cars.com and pulled few vin numbers of the cars with the same make/model and similar mileage as my own to check their value, CarMax all of sudden started to tell me that âthere are not enough carsâ like these in the market, therefore I would have to make an appointment to get an appraisal in person. Obviously, with a ton of 2021 GLCs trading out there I donât believe that CarMax all of a sudden lost a clue about their value, especially when it keeps updating me via email how badly my car depreciates the longer I refuse to rush to sell it to them.
So, I wonder if they have the rigged algorithm that:
A. Estimates how âeagerâ you are to trade (if a lot of dealers run your vin, Carmax assumes you are desperate to get rid of your car, so it reduces offer to get you sell it for less)
B. Makes car owners assume that their car value is dropping quickly, in hopes that duped $uckers will rush to sell their car before it drops in value any further.
In my case the effect is opposite, I just decided to hold to my car even faster, since it would be really foolish to pay high premium with high MF and low incentives for a newer MB while also loosing a chunk of money on top of it because of the negative equity. But I can imagine how it could work the other way around with most of the people in the market (what people do when stocks fall? They all sell it, even if the true value of stock is high. What they do when stock prices soar? They rush to buy until bubble bursts. One should be careful not to blindly rush to make an impulsive decision, or risk high losses).
I wanted to ask experienced leasehakrs, have you experienced similar trends with your car valuation when giving your vin number around to a lot of places and renewing your carmax offer once a week?
Is this something CarMax does to dupe you?
Or, is there all of a sudden a flood of 2021 GLCâs exchanged for newer gen GLCâs, thus causing this enormous drop in car value in a matter of two weeks?
Itâs just so odd that while the cost of getting new MB is such that sometimes I think rupees and yens have replaced dollar here, the used MBâs value so drastically declines in a matter of two weeks.
What are your thoughts on it?
To Moderators: if this is inappropriate topic to ask hackrs, please move it to a different sub-forum. I just thought it might be an interesting topic to discuss for those in the market to trade in their cars to get a new one, and checking a CarMax value as a way to appraise their current cars.