What the numbers mean
Every price MarketCheck observes is an advertised price, not a sale price. This governs how every report should be read.
What the numbers mean
Read this before anything else. It changes how you interpret every figure in every report, and it is the difference between using this data well and drawing a wrong conclusion confidently.
Every price is an advertised price
MarketCheck observes what dealers ask, not what buyers pay. Negotiated transaction prices are not publicly observable, so no product here reports them, and any tool that claims to is inferring rather than measuring.
Three consequences follow, and they matter in every report:
"Recently off-market" is a sold proxy, not a sale price. When a vehicle disappears from listings we record its last advertised price. It probably sold, and it probably sold for less than that. We use it because it is the closest observable signal to a sale, not because it is one.
The MarketCheck Price predicts an optimal asking price. It is a machine-learned estimate of what this vehicle should be listed at in this market at this mileage. It is not a prediction of what it will sell for. Fair market value sits below it, and the gap is roughly the negotiating room.
A gap between asking and predicted price is a positioning signal. If a unit asks $2,000 over its predicted price, that tells you it is priced above the market's current ask, not that it is overpriced by $2,000 in a transaction sense.
Read all of it as list-price intelligence: pricing power, market positioning, days to clear, supply and demand. Do not read it as a record of what vehicles sold for.
Where the data comes from
Coverage is dealer websites, crawled continuously and built up over years. It is near-complete for franchise and independent dealer inventory in the US.
It is not a marketplace aggregator feed, and it does not include private-party listings. Where a report says a price was "verified", it means the figure was read from the selling dealer's own vehicle page, with documentation and dealer add-on fees excluded, and a timestamped snapshot of that page cached as evidence.
Coverage limits worth knowing before you build
United States only. The NeoVIN decode set behind VIN specification, window stickers and options matching covers US-market vehicles. UK and other international VINs will not decode.
No wholesale or auction data. There is no Manheim, ACV, IAAI or Copart transaction feed here. Where a report produces a maximum bid, it is derived from a retail anchor by subtracting your target margin and reconditioning cost. It is not validated against what units actually clear for in a lane. If you are buying salvage or branded-title units, retail comparables of clean-title cars are the wrong denominator and the figure will mislead you.
Mileage is required for most valuations. A VIN with no usable odometer reading cannot be valued. Reports list those VINs separately and never charge for them.
How a comparable is chosen
Reports that value a specific vehicle build a comparable set from active listings, ranked on configuration match rather than proximity alone:
- VIN pattern (characters 4 to 8), which encodes the body, engine and trim family
- Mileage proximity to the subject
- Drivetrain and engine where the listing publishes them
- Installed options overlap, from the full VIN decode where both vehicles decode
A field the listing does not publish is treated as unknown, not as a mismatch. A comparable that does not state its drivetrain scores partial credit rather than zero, because a listing omitting a fact is not evidence that the fact differs.
What a confidence figure is and is not
Where a report gives a confidence grade or a range, it describes how much agreeing evidence there was: how many comparables, how tightly they clustered, how close they were in configuration and mileage. High confidence on a thin market still means thin.
A confidence band is a statement about the evidence, never a guarantee about the vehicle.