proving your car's value

[Lee Levitt <wheelman@shore.net>]

If you drive an older, possibly collectible, car, one of the best things
you can do is have *lots* of information to prove its value. This includes:

1. Complete set of pictures, inside and out, showing high points of car.
2. Complete set of receipts for everything done to/added to car.
3. Collection of "comps" or comparable value sales of similar cars
4. Appraisal by expert

One of the things a club might do (and we did do this in the VSA 1800 club)
is to maintain a database of auto sales prices, and publish it quarterly or
annually. This way, when the bozo says "lessee, it was a 14 year old Audi,
$1200", you can *show* him that equivalent Urqs are selling for $16,000
across the country on a regular basis.

The more ammunition you have, the more likely you are to come out okay. But
the onus is on you to show that the car was unusual, and that its condition
was better than that of a typical 14 year old beater...

Even some of the stated value insurance policies are garbage, so you have
to read their fine print very carefully.

Maybe someone could set up a web page to accept the following information:

location, asking price, sale price, model, year, mileage, equipment,
name/phone of owner/seller, VIN (if available)

Then anyone that sees an ad for certain cars could just dump the info into
the database...

Thoughts? Volunteers? Suspects?

Lee
Lee Levitt
wheelman@shore.net
Director, Business Development, Software.com - http://www.software.com
webmaster, NeedhamOnline - http://www.needhamonline.com
1990 Audi 200T, 75K
1995 Range Rover County LWB, 42K
1987 Wicked Fat Chance, 1981 Condor