Leasehackr Signed Deals Database

At the end of the day, the most beneficial thing for me when shopping a brand I have never shopped for is understanding what is an acceptable % off pre incentive for the car. This is the hardest piece imo to know for a consumer without coming off like a dreamer to a dealer. Today, the only way I know is through past deals or broker sites. This is already very helpful and I am good with the way it is. I just feel with all these nooblets around, having a floating list that shows good/ok/bad % pre incentive on make and models and year would be extremely helpful. Everything else changes month to month generally.

We often say things like 7-11% is broker status, 5-7% is ok, 0 to 3% is poor etc… generalizing of course

Imagine a page these nooblets can go and it lists all the year, make, model and has a general guideline of what tiers of % preincentive is considered unicorn/good/ok/bad. This alone would be beneficial and help a consumer know before any other variable they are receiving something competitive. Of course they will then need to refer to leasing 101 and understand the rest of the variables

And that’s information your never going to know until you step out and chase the deal. It’s pretty simple to see that most brands the goal is 10% if you hit 11-12% expect a MF bump. Subaru in the northeast your never going to see 10% off. So not only will this data need to be done on vehicles but specific regions. I work with big data and the car manufactures keep the dealerships in the dark on all of this…so to think we can trend it is not likely.

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The info you are referring to is based on experience which 90% of these members do not have. What you provided would be valuable and adding by region would be another attribute worth including.

They join ask generalized questions we point them to Edmunds and ask them to start to crawl, they come back with a crazy quote…now we teach them to take the first step…your data is for people who are running. Once your running you don’t need any data outside of what is possible that month. In the time I have been responding to this thread I have helped two people outside this site learn to negotiate a deal in a few simple text messages. Didn’t cost them anything more then the initiative to learn, and push back on the dealer. No graphs, no historical data, only incentives and desire to learn. Give a man a fish feed him for a day, teach him to fish…he won’t ask dumb fishing questions anymore.

The most important number is the discount on the car BEFORE any rebates and incentives, if we can have a historical sheet of each car, then it will much easier for anyone to hack a deal.

To a point.

Once you have quality data (which was my first point), you have to understand a lot about it before you use it for decision support, which is what you are proposing.

Let’s assume I have 3 years of BMW deals, and it’s April of 2020. None of the historical data is going to stay on trend, so you either need to wait for new data, or you have to test your hypothesis in the market.

Otherwise you still get nonsense like

And @mllcb42 will ask what they saw when they searched shared deals and the marketplace (they didn’t).

But we can also suggest they search this new db of deals, that is neither statistically significant nor a representative cross-section (it’s basically the extremes of the range for all US lease deals in a month), and still draw the wrong conclusions.

Nobody wants all the data, they want:

Min(pre-incentive discount), and the deals where you don’t care about the sausage making but the payment is insanely-low to free, which requires a lot more logic.

I think the concept is interesting, but it’s not trivial, it doesn’t have a clear customer who would derive direct benefit in an MVP, assuming you solved for both data volume (enough deals to be useful/meaningful) and data quality.

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the problem with this logic, is that a contract/deal can show 15-20% off MSRP but be marked up 2-5% on the rate. same way a purchase contract can. having information from years or even months prior is completely useless. there’s over 30 manufacturers with body refreshes, different model years, demos, regional rebates, and for example with me Silverado MSRP ranges from 35,000-65,000! RV changes from beginning to end of year. Managers also change daily…

the only thing that is helpful as a whole is every dealer knows a general idea of payment and regions. I can tell someone that asks me if a base Traverse if $600 a month to lease? hell no! it’s like 300-400 per month give or take, and i know Nevada, Arizona, and certain regions in California don’t discount like we do here.

Until you can figure out how to get every rebate someone qualifies for, employer, military, costco, samsclub, tax rate, credit rate, down payment v driveoffs, all their lease brands, how their registration fees are, etc etc every program out there.
I see it happen a lot since my thread has my old deals from when i started the forum. “hey i want your $400 tahoe lease”… okay, that was almost 4 years ago and a different body style, different rebate, high RV, it was only a couple years into that body style, we had a different CFO for GM. Well it’s just not the same.

most shoppers, i think brokers can agree, is based on needs and wants. Okay customer wants cheapest 8 passenger SUV with a power tailgate and forward collision with a $350 payment possible. Okay here’s xxx cars that’ll work with xxx amount down.

Rather than just “lowest payment ever on that car” that’s never been replicated, an average is the quickest info people want. Prior to car business, if i thought to lease a Benz I would think like 700/800. Okay knowing now, I’ve seen at as low as 250, but usually hovers somewhere around 400ish.

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Valid points on all ends, I agree there are a lot of other factors that need to be factored in when looking at a lease deal holistically. Based on the feedback since the start of the thread, I’ve pivoted to only providing discounts pre-incentive by Region, Year, Make , Model. Excluding all other factors, this can help new comers and members who normally do not shop for a BMW, Mercedes etc… get a relative baseline on what a reasonable and achievable pre-incentive discount should look like whether its 3%, 5%, 10% and so on.

As mentioned, this is only one component and will not lead to a strong deal with just 1 factor but it can help drive the conversation for people when they are negotiating as they are equipped with a baseline pre-incentive %, edmunds (MF/RV/Incentives). They can then use this information to compare to brokers/dealer sheets and past signed deals to overall get a better understanding of how their deal fits.

Something as simple as the below to serve as a guideline, made up numbers below

If we throw out any practicality in actually getting the data and instead just focus on what one would want, I’d like to see essentially the mean pre-incentive discount, adjusted for buy rate, and the standard deviation.

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Exactly and this will be meaningful data points on what type of % are being awarded across brand year and regions with mean/std, # of data points etc…

@mllcb42 pretty much nailed the number everyone should care about.

also isn’t this just what truecar does?

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It’s what TrueCar seems to basically claim they do, although I’m yet to see any evidence to suggest they correctly normalize the information, that it’s pre-incentive, or that it’s actually real quality data.

These days, TrueCar seems to just be a lead generator for the dealers.

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TrueCar, Edmunds, and CarGurus have similar tools that offer a distribution of prices, rated Average Deal, Good Deal, Great Deal, etc. Usually the suggested prices include incentives, so you’ll need to account for that. Seems more relevant than historical selling prices, though.

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Their pricing seems to include incentives… sometimes. Unfortunately, without the clarity as to which incentives are included and which aren’t, their numbers become pretty much useless.

I noticed on GM cars the discount pre rebates are usually very low, like 4-5% but on Honda it’s more like 10%.

This is exactly what I am talking about and I think what I am hoping gets implemented would be beneficial for everyone. Based on your experience, you are inferring these %'s but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to view historical based on numerous data points of whether what you are inferring is actually in focus or not?

:point_up_2:

To the non-data people here, you all seem to be providing tons of reasons why more data is good

If you’ve spent enough time on this site, you’ve watched trusted hackrs pain themselves helping newbies who want the easy solution to leasing. Payment shoppers and those who rely on single data points almost always are firmly reminded that the best way to structure a deal is to understand all of the variables that go into the process (MF, RV, regional incentives, State and local tax, regional expectations for pre-incentive discount, etc.). All of this data (yes, historical figures too) provide context on how to attack the right deal in the current month - The max, min, mean, median, mode, and standard deviation are all very basic but useful metrics for a huge dataset than can inform someone as to what then is a reasonable ask to dealers and what is not.

Companies pay trillions of dollars to glean insights from big data. It’s very easy to be dismissive of a concept that is difficult to achieve, without conceptualizing how cool/valuable it would be to have a sortable tool that could spit out current and historical data points for a specific model in a specific region (say Lexus RS350 as shown above) and plot those deals on a scatterplot to show where the average deal falls based on a given RV or pre-incentive discount, for example.

Maybe I’m just the nerd here, but I feel that the possibilities with a crowdsourced dataset like this would be endless. oh well… another great idea that will probably just go to die

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It’s just like the monthly deals <$250/mo. thread that @Lvs23 used to put together. It was a great idea. However, it was too much unpaid work for someone to constantly support. If this data is so valuable, someone needs to volunteer to start it up and keep it running. I’m not seeing any volunteers, I’m only seeing people interested using the data once someone does all the hard work for them. :spoon:

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How many signed deals are posted on LH everyday? Not many. Once the data is aggregated, maintenance will be minimal.

I for sure will volunteer as this would be helpful for everyone

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Here’s a screenshot of my 1st attempt at compiling some of this data over the summer. I’m not for a second suggesting it isn’t a gargantuan effort (I didn’t last long on my own) which is why it needs to be a group effort!

BMW, as many have mentioned, is one of the least complicated due to the MF not fluctuating by model. I essentially tried to catalogue historical incentives based on some postings and what I could verify myself. You could populate this sheet with info from deal posts as well.

As many would expect, 30 brands and thousands of models later, this sheet would be massive and would have to be stored externally (+have that storage paid for). But, from this you could build a number of simple algorithms to manufacture max, min, and average deals in a given month over time, which you could then plot on graphs and identify trends, etc.

This was pretty tiresome work to do manually, and if you look at the RV scrape thread and some of the work done by @RustyDaemon, @edmcman, @Splattered and others on the tech crew, you’ll see its definitely easier when people with strong coding backgrounds are involved, and you start to compile large datasets much more efficiently.

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