
Show HN: Track UK car price depreciation – get alerted when prices change - dabeeeenster
https://www.carpricetracker.com/
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dabeeeenster
Hi HN. I really want to buy a Golf GTE, but was worried that they were still
depreciating quite heavily. Looking around the web, I couldn't see a way of
tracking the price of a used car over time.

I'd bookmarked the search page on AutoTrader, and regularly went back to it to
see if they were any cheaper. Low and behold, the cars were depreciating, but
it was a drag having to go back to the site each time. I was too lazy to put
the prices and dates in a spreadsheet.

Writing this little app seemed like way less work (it wasn't, but whatever). I
thought it might be useful to other people, so I bought a domain and here we
are.

Would love feedback! Would this work in the US? What are the large car sites
in the US?

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mewwts
Very cool tool. I work on similar stuff, and I wrote this blog post last year.
[http://bytes.schibsted.com/price-car-data/](http://bytes.schibsted.com/price-
car-data/)

With time most models will see an exponential decay, according to my analysis.
But some will, of course, decay faster than others.

~~~
adamqureshi
I wanna build a tool like this for my marketplace idea.
[http://onlyusedtesla.com/](http://onlyusedtesla.com/) i have 47 listings and
growing weekly. Would love to offer some useful metrics to my users.

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Drakula2k
I'm using this service for such things:
[https://urlooker.com](https://urlooker.com) It allows to track any prices,
not just cars.

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Cyph0n
That's a very inefficient way to track prices over a long period of time.

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dabeeeenster
Just to say the site has not been up long, and so I dont have a lot of price
history, but an example of what I wrote it for is here:

[https://www.carpricetracker.com/search/2/Golf+GTE](https://www.carpricetracker.com/search/2/Golf+GTE)

I want to track how quickly the price of that model was dropping. Hopefully
over time a nice curve will be produced.

~~~
cm2187
Come on developpers. Stop showing amounts of money without a comma separator
for thousands. Even in banking half of the developpers do that. Imagine when
you are dealing with amounts in billions...

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cs02rm0
PH user here - have you posted it on their forums?

 _If we spot that the lowest price has changed from the previous day, we 'll
email you an alert right away._

Do you do anything about sellers listing cars at £0, £1 or some other below
market value? What about excluding cat d cars, etc?

~~~
dabeeeenster
Yeah I did and it got removed. Some reason or other.

Haven't written a price cleaner etc or started looking at crash recoveries -
quite a bit more tricky! Also PH allow e.h. 996 C4S to be advertised as 996
Turbos as they have "Turbo Bodykit" or somesuch which is really annoying. I
blame Porsche drivers ;)

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averageweather
This is not as specific as your tool, but similar I believe, if anyone is
interested: [https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/price-
trends/](https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/price-trends/)

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robin_reala
It’s got pretty bad when my automatic “it’s deprecation, not depreciation”
correction is applying to legitimate uses.

