Whether you’re following property values or reselling items online, smart tech is making it increasingly easy and rewarding to track the value of the items you own.
Motorway recently discovered that 41 percent of vehicle owners don’t know their car’s worth. Car values change all the time, so people need specialised tools to track them.
This becomes apparent when people sell a car. Some sellers put their car on the market without checking its value, which means they might not be getting the best price for such a valuable asset.
That’s why Motorway created its handy Car Value Tracker tool. It allows car owners to see monthly price movements and track the ongoing value of up to six vehicles at once, all for free.
Motorway is the UK’s fastest-growing used-car marketplace. The company helps people sell their cars quickly and easily, with its network of more than 5,000 verified car dealers competing to give their best price for sellers’ cars.
By signing up to Motorway, you can sell your car for a great price in as little as 24 hours. The whole selling process can be completed without leaving your home, and they’ll even collect the car from you for free.
How to value your car
Car Value Tracker is free to use on motorway.co.uk. Using Motorway’s smart technology, the tracker tells you your vehicle’s value over time, giving you up to 24 months of pricing history plotted on a graph.
You’ll be able to see how your car’s value is changing, whether it’s depreciating, holding value, or even rising. You can check your car’s value at any point on Motorway, and sign up for monthly email alerts.
To use the Car Value Tracker, simply create a free Motorway account and input your reg and mileage for a live valuation. An interactive map will then display the car’s latest valuation, and a graph will show historical valuations, as well as your overall two-year change (e.g. -2.23%). You can turn on (or off) monthly alerts reminding you to confirm your mileage for an updated valuation.
When you scroll below the pricing graph, you’ll see vehicles similar to yours that sold recently on Motorway, with the prices they fetched. In addition, the dynamic Car Value Tracker webpage shows whether or not your vehicle is compliant with the UK’s Clean Air Zones such as ULEZ in Greater London. Motorway even shares the number of dealer bids from the last month your current valuation was based upon, for total transparency and trust in the numbers.
Why do car values change?
All cars depreciate at varying rates. As demand shifts, so does the rate of change in value.
And sometimes, things actually go in the other direction. In 2021, due to the pandemic and a lack of new cars being supplied, many popular models went up in price year-on-year.
While some details such as condition, mileage, and the availability of new cars can be easy enough to predict, it’s almost impossible to calculate your car’s value every year using this information alone.
It’s useful to understand what impacts your car’s value, but even more helpful to visualise how that price changes over time, from month to month.
Motorway’s Car Value Tracker is a first-of-its-kind product that uses advanced data science techniques to analyse data on thousands of cars that have sold through the Motorway platform. It also uses hundreds of thousands of bids from dealers to model each individual car’s valuation history.
What if a car is on finance?
When a vehicle’s valuation is higher than the remaining balance to pay, normally at least three or four years into contract, this could be a great time to sell a vehicle with outstanding finance – also known as being in positive equity.
If a seller is in positive equity, they can sell their car to a verified dealer with Motorway. The dealer will clear the outstanding balance directly with the lender, and pay the surplus straight into your bank account.
Vehicle owners can now find the perfect time to sell. They have the ability to track the value of their financed car or van on Motorway’s Car Value Tracker, and monitor their finance settlement as they pay off the debt.
Motorway’s exclusive and free tool is providing people with more understanding of their car as a financial asset, and is helping car owners make the most of their money.