What is the best resource for seeing days on lot?

Ask the Hackrs
1

Hi fellow hackrs!

I’ve noticed that a lot of the dealerships near me don’t list their cars on Cargurus or Truecar so I am trying to find a way to get data on how long a specific VIN has been at a dealer. I am more than happy to pay a monthly fee, but I’m going to be looking at a lot of cars so anything that’s a cost per VIN pull is probably going to be prohibitively expensive.

Is there some resource I’m not aware of that the rest of you are using? Thanks!

1 Like
2

When I chased the EQS frenzy, I used MB inventory page to find a Benz.

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Cars.com now has a feature to sort by days lot or listed

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Did you try googling the VIN and see what aggregator sites list it?

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Sure did :frowning:

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Someone on here let me know about caredge.com which lists a days on market value.

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You should be careful about using Cars.com to sort by age vs Cargurus.com to sort by aged.

Cargurus tags individual VINs and tracks how long those are listed. If the inventory swaps dealers (and the listing party or stock number changes), Cargurus will not reset the timer. However, I am aware of some workarounds some shrewd folks may use to re-set this timer; so it’s not 100% reliable either.

Example of how Cargurus shows age on an inventory swap.
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Contrast that with Cars.com. If a dealer does an inventory swap, and the new dealer re-lists the same vehicle, Cars.com treats that as a brand new listing and that re-sets the timer. The same car from my example above (that was swapped 35 days ago) shows up as as a very new listing on Cars.com.

The most consistent way I’ve seen to confirm aged inventory is looking at the VIN sequence. Like a EQS 450 4Matic Sedan (I am not quite sure about the RWD 450+) manufactured in Sindelfingen in the 2023 model year went through a range of VINs.

If you see PA02XXXX, you know it’s aged and probably hitting its first birthday
If you see PA03XXXX, it’s probably manufactured in Q1 2023.
If you see PA04XXXX, it probably laded in dealer stock/wholesale sometime after April or May 2023.

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You should honestly be able to tell oldest stock based on the stock number. Not the easiest way but it will be reliable

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