Does anyone have a view as to how good the “Edmunds suggested prices” are for most cars? Are those generally inflated numbers that dealers would be very happy with or are they realistic prices for what can be negotiated?
Also, at a given dealer is the purchase price that you can negotiate to buy the car the same as the purchase price that you can negotiate as the starting point for a lease transaction? Or are those likely to differ?
The only useful information on edmunds, at least in my opinion, is the rv/mf/incentives information they provide on their forum when you ask for your zip code.
Use the shared deals and market place listings here to establish your pre-incentive discount targets.
The pre-incentive sales price on a car is generally the same regardless of if it’s a purchase or a lease, but one must be sure to back out all the incentives, even if the dealer doesn’t itemize them.
Pre-incentive price is the same. Purchase or lease. This is dealer discount.
Incentives can vary widely between purchase/captive financing/lease.
Typically every carbuying website has a “suggested price” that they create based on “current market variables”. Problem is, we as the buying public have no idea of what the variables are.
Could be the dealer suggesting their price (which may nor may not be accurate) or it could be based on some dealer transactional data (accurate). And finally their is no legal obligation for their dealer network to honor that price (some carbuying websites give you an output of their suggested price, but have a disclaimer to use it as a guide and not a written quote)
The simple answer/conclusion is unless you see pricing data, from either recently signed deals or price shopping, the suggested price is a magical number that may or may not provide an accurate picture of your marketplace.
Even more, what’s to say that their threshold for a good deal and our threshold for a good deal is the same?
In a perfect world, I’d love to see a source that broke out normalized pre-incentive sales price over a large amount of sales. From there, one could establish the mean and the standard deviation and say something like “I’m going to set my target price for an aggressive deal at mean + 2 sigma.” Unfortunately, that’s data that we, as consumers, are never going to get.
The day we see full access to large transactional data, is the day getting a “deal” is paying full msrp for a purchase or leasing with a poor residual and marked mF…
You know the State should have your Sales Price based on registration data.
Has any company done a FOIA request and then sold that info to other websites yet?
didnt know that was a thing.
One would also need to know what direct to dealer incentives were rolled into that sales price.
Gotta Start Somewhere @mllcb42 , gotta start somewhere.
Other problem is that the by the time a FOIA request actually goes through, the data will probably be outdated. 
You never know, as I saw on a video, the SharkTank guys told this guy who was selling picture taking Doorbells to hit the road after 30 seconds.
This guy founded Blink, which sold to Amazon for Billions.
So you never know, in my world all data is good data, even if it is old or bad.
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