I think as we talked about in this thread, reserving it to just % pre-incentive discount would be easiest to manage and reduce the # of columns.
Can someone let me know if they can access this? I started with two of the latest deals, including yours @dloco (feel free to edit it for accuracy)
I think we have hit the first hurdle here is how to make this useful. You have pre-incentive selling price listed, but that includes the direct to dealer money in it. For the data to be useful, someone needs to go in and manually extract that. Now, you would hope that when the deal gets posted, all of that info would be itemized, but rarely is it actually.
Quick problems I’ve discovered within the first 3 examples are
- Incomplete/missing info
- Calc doesn’t match description…not sure which is right
Assuming you had 1 and 2, my ideal solution would be to plug variables into the calc I’ve built which accurately replicates all deal info you’d find in desking software (try not to scrutinize the deal sheet below, as I grabbed what I had and it doesn’t look like I fully finished the job here… )
I’ve been building this for a couple months and testing it with new deals every so often. My goal has been to be able to 100% accurately plug in variables from random users and spit out accurate lease contracts/numbers. Let’s say I finally work out all of the kinks in the calc, and then build up the database of useful deals, I can then iteratively run through each line of that database of deals and spit out all of the information you could ever would need or want.
For now, it’s very clear so far that a lot of deal posts will have to get tossed for being incomplete. Hopefully we can steer future posters to provide all the relevant/necessary info to make this thing work…
Iterate, iterate, iterate
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How much time figuratively speaking have we spent not just in this thread but compiling the data?
The first step, unfortunately, will be getting them to actually get the relevant/necessary info. I don’t think a day goes by without someone asking for feedback on a Volvo deal where they fail to recognize that there are incentives rolled into the selling price, despite every previously posted thread talking about it.
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I admit I’m already tired after doing this for 10 minutes hahah but I just imagine the possibilities. Would be great to automate this somehow where the data would be extracted to a db after someone posts the numbers into LH within their post (form fill?)
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Revisiting this thread which inspired our effort to build SIGNED!.
We are interested in why many folks are willing to share their numbers on the forum but are reluctant to post the same information on SIGNED!. Is it too much work or is it out of privacy concerns?
The goal of SIGNED! is to make deals shared on the forum easier to parse. The request for a redacted contract is to enable the community to spot erroneous entries, which happen more frequently than you think. We do not have the capacity to manually check each submission for data entry accuracy, so we hope this time we can do better with a crowdsourced approach.
We would love to hear more of your suggestions on how we can improve SIGNED!.
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Awesome work, this is great! Glad y’all were able to make it a reality.
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Was happy to supply my info for it. Keeps the clutter off of the forums and makes it simple for everyone else to see what the deal was. Plus, with the info there for who posted the deal, reaching out is easy for dealer requests and what not.
I was a little hesitant to upload my contract because I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to be public. Instead of making the actual contract visible to everyone how about you require that a contract be uploaded for verification purposes and a member of the staff her verify the info is correct but then not make the contract public?
That way we know the numbers are correct as they’ve been verified but the contract itself isn’t visible to everyone.
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I’ve said it somewhere before - remove the county, just leave the state, IMO.
I know the taxes often differ by county, but still.
I absolutely would not mind a simple set of numbers (no contract visible publicly) with a ‘Verified!’ stamp of approval from staff, who have seen the contract. Members could still be queried via pm if I wanted a pdf of their contract, and they were willing to share.
Two more thoughts after posting this: 1) Verified! is much the same as Signed!, 2) Could make the actual contract database a Supporters only feature. A large database of signed and verified contracts representing a snapshot in time has value, imo.
The problem with this approach is that it does not solve the issue we set out to solve – staff capacity.
If the reluctance to participate on SIGNED! is indeed primarily due to privacy concern arising from contract publication, an alternative approach is to allow users to opt out of contract publication and show the listing as “unverified”. The contract would only be verified upon request.
If it’s due to “too much work”, then the only way to solve it is to not require a contract, which we don’t think it’s worthwhile as it would jeopardize the quality of the dataset.
I highly doubt asking users to enter their county causes privacy concern. If someone really wants to stalk a person, there are better ways to do so than searching for someone who has gotten a Land Rover for $653/mo in Bergen County, New Jersey.
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Right, but still some piece of private info that may make someone think twice.
Just a thought - would it be possible to make the MSRP visible without having to click ‘Details’. I think seeing the combo of MSRP, DAS and Monthly is helpful in one single view.