How We Value Collector Cars — and How Often We're Right

The methodology behind CarSearch.Pro's True Values, mileage curves and price forecasts — with our full walk-forward track record published below, misses included. Updated July 2026.

665,000+Active listings tracked

707,000+Confirmed sale records

696,000+VINs with history

14Marketplaces, nightly

The data

Every night we aggregate listings from 14 marketplaces — Bring a Trailer, Cars & Bids, eBay Motors, AutoTrader, CarGurus, Cars.com, TrueCar, Hagerty, AT Classics, Classic.com, AutoTempest, Craigslist, AutoList and Facebook Marketplace — across 500+ tracked collector and enthusiast car markets. Sold results come from 10+ auction houses (Mecum, Barrett-Jackson, RM Sotheby's, Bonhams, Gooding & Co and others) plus completed marketplace sales. Each listing is VIN-decoded where possible, geocoded, and tracked over its whole life: price changes, delisting, relisting — even when the same car reappears on a different platform.

True Value: sale-anchored, not ask-averaged

Most price guides average asking prices. Sellers ask whatever they want; cars sell for what buyers pay. Our True Value is anchored to confirmed sales first:

Sold results carry full weight. Auction hammer prices are grossed up for buyer's premium so values reflect what the buyer actually paid, all-in.
Delisted cars carry partial weight, scaled by the probability they actually sold (estimated from how long they sat and how they disappeared).
Asking prices carry a small weight — they signal seller expectations, not market value.
Mileage-normalized. Every comparable is adjusted along the market's own empirical mileage curve before blending, so a wave of low-mile cars hitting the market doesn't masquerade as appreciation.
Trim-aware. Halo variants (GT3 RS, Z06, Hellcat…) get their own True Value; the base market's value excludes them, so one doesn't inflate the other.

Every market's True Value, fair range and current verdict is on its price guide page.

Mileage curves: learned, not assumed

Most guides assume value falls linearly with miles. It doesn't. For ~490 markets we learn the actual price-vs-mileage relationship from that market's own sales. On a Porsche 911 (997), a sub-1,000-mile car trades around 4.4× the reference value, a 40,000-mile car around 1.1×, a 230,000-mile car around 0.5× — a curve, not a line, and it's different for every market. Thin markets borrow their category's curve with shrinkage rather than pretending to precision.

Forecasts — and the track record

Our 6/12/24-month forecasts are probabilistic direction calls (up/down, with probability), built from deseasonalized robust trends with regime detection. Every month we re-run each forecast as if we only knew what was knowable then, and grade it against what actually happened. That's a walk-forward test — no hindsight, no cherry-picking. Here is the complete record:

Horizon	Walk-forward tests	Markets covered	Directional hit rate
6 months	28,017	446	59.8%
12 months	25,394	426	56.2%
24 months	20,482	393	57.5%

As of July 2026. Hit rate = share of calls where the realized direction matched. Weighted by test count per market. Individual market track records are shown on each market's price guide.

Why publish this? A 56–60% directional hit rate is honest, not magical — usefully better than a coin flip, nowhere near a crystal ball. Nobody else in this space publishes their accuracy at all. We'd rather you calibrate your trust on real numbers than on marketing. Where our confidence is low (thin markets, volatile regimes), the forecast says so.

VIN histories

Because we track every listing across every source by VIN, we can show a car's whole life: every time it was listed, at what price, where, with archived photos — including cars that bounced between auction sites, dealers and Facebook. That's 696,000+ VIN pages, each one a small biography. It also powers relist detection (the "Previously Listed" badge with prior price) and title-status inheritance: if a VIN was ever structurally flagged (salvage, flood, rebuilt), that follows the car even when it reappears on a platform that doesn't disclose it.

What we don't do

We don't sell cars, take listing fees, or earn commission on sales — no incentive to flatter values.
We don't hand-pick comps. Selection is algorithmic (mileage-nearest, recency-weighted) and identical for every user.
We don't hide the misses. Forecast accuracy is published per market, per horizon, hit or miss.

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