Used car alerts and price drop alerts. How they work and what they are worth
The cars worth buying do not sit on the market. A car listed well under what the rest of its kind are asking is usually sold the same day, and almost always to somebody who happened to be looking at the right moment. An alert is simply a way of being that somebody without refreshing a search all day.
What an alert can tell you, and what it cannot
A price alert compares one advert against other adverts. That is all it does, and it is genuinely useful, because what you are choosing between today is what is on sale today. It is not a valuation and it is not an opinion about the car.
So an alert can tell you that a car is listed below the going rate. It cannot tell you why. The three reasons a car is cheap are a seller in a hurry, a car with something wrong with it, and a record the advert does not mention. Only the first one is good news for you.
How we decide a price is low
We put cars into groups that are actually comparable. The same make, the same model, a three year window and a forty thousand mile window, so a 2017 car with sixty thousand miles is compared with other 2016 to 2018 cars between forty and eighty thousand miles, and not with a newer one or a worn out one.
Then we look at the spread of asking prices inside that group and put the advert somewhere in it.
- GREAT. Listed at least ten percent below the cheapest quarter of its group. These are the ones that go within hours.
- GOOD. At or below the cheapest quarter.
- FAIR. Inside the normal spread. Nothing wrong with it, nothing special about the price.
- OVERPRICED. Above the dearest quarter of its group.
We also say how confident we are, because a group built from eight adverts deserves less trust than one built from forty. That number is on the alert, not buried.
How quickly you hear
Reading the market more often than we send is deliberate. We read it every half hour and send a message every hour with whatever is new. The exception is a GREAT or a GOOD, which goes out within half an hour of us seeing it, because an hour is long enough to lose that car.
Everything arrives by email. We are not on WhatsApp yet, and when we are it will say so on this page.
The honest limitation
A car can only be given a badge when the advert tells us the make, the model, the year and the mileage. Plenty of adverts leave the mileage out. When one of the four is missing we say unknown rather than invent a comparison, so some of what we send carries no badge at all.
On the market we read, a little under a sixth of live adverts carry all four today. We would rather you knew that before paying than found it out afterwards. It is the thing we are working on, and the badge coverage grows as that gets better.
Why the price is the easy half
Finding a cheap car is the part a computer is good at. Working out whether the cheap car is a trap is a different job, and it is the one that costs people real money. Outstanding finance can take the whole car off you after you have paid. An insurance write off nobody mentioned knocks the value down again when you sell. Wound back mileage means you are buying a tired car at a fresh car price.
None of that shows in the price. It shows in the records, and that is a separate lookup. What a car check tells you before you buy goes through all three in plain words.
Using the two together
The pack and the check do different halves of the same job. The £10 Road Ready pack takes your budget and watches the market for you until a car turns up, and takes you through cover, tax and insurance once one does. The £5 check takes one number plate and tells you what is recorded against it.
If you already have a car in front of you, start with the check. If you are still looking, start with the pack and check the car when you find it.
Common questions
What is a used car price drop alert?
It is a message that reaches you when a car you would want is listed at a price below what similar cars are being advertised for. The useful part is not the alert itself. It is the speed. A clearly underpriced car is gone in hours, usually to somebody who happened to look at the right minute, so the whole value of an alert is that it reaches you before the car is sold.
How often do you look?
Every thirty minutes we read the market again. Every hour we send what has appeared since the last message. If a car comes up that is well under the going rate, it does not wait for the hourly message, it goes out within half an hour. That is the only difference between the two messages, and it exists because those are the cars that disappear first.
How do you decide a car is cheap?
We group cars by make, model, a three year window and a forty thousand mile window, and we work out what that group is being advertised at. A car is called GREAT when it is listed at ten percent or more below the cheapest quarter of its group, and GOOD when it is at or below the cheapest quarter. Those two get sent straight away. FAIR means it sits inside the normal spread. OVERPRICED means it is above the dearest quarter.
Where do your prices come from?
From the adverts themselves, collected and grouped by us. They are asking prices, not sold prices, and they are not a trade guide. That matters in both directions. A whole model can be advertised optimistically for months, and our number would follow it up. So read the badge as a comparison against what else is on sale right now, which is what you are actually choosing between, and not as a valuation.
Why would a car show as unknown?
Because the advert did not give us enough to compare it with. We need the make, the model, the year and the mileage. An advert missing any one of those cannot be put in a group, so it gets no badge rather than a guessed one. On the market we are reading, a little under a sixth of live adverts carry all four, which is the honest size of the limitation and the thing we are working on.
Do I need an account?
No. You pay, you get a link, and the pack runs. There is no subscription and nothing renews. You can set a password afterwards if you want your packs in one place, and nothing stops working if you never do.
How do the alerts reach me?
By email. We are not on WhatsApp yet and we will say so here when we are, rather than promising it now.
Does an alert mean the car is a good car?
No, and this is worth being blunt about. The badge is about the price and nothing else. A cheap car can be cheap because it is written off, because there is finance owing on it, or because the mileage is not what the advert says. That is a different question and it is the one the five pound check answers. Use both: the alert finds the car, the check tells you whether to go and see it.