Who's wrong with prices, Parkers or the dealers?

[jeffw]

It's a buyers market when your selling and a sellers market when your buying...in my experience !

[mikeyquattro]

I think that parkers and glasses guides are a load of crap.
It's publishers like this that push the prices down privately but the dealers can do what they like!
Perhaps they are dealers!
I dunno, it just F**ks me off!

[david7m]

Where do Parkers and co. get there info, if its from actual sale prices, I'd like to see where they are for sale, eg Isle of Sky

Dave

[flossymeister]

i suspect that parker's, glasses etc all just have logorithms that spit out automated numbers for every single car on the market, so you are probably watching S4s still depreciating at the same rate as other A4s. Which is daft, because they won't drop half as fast any more, having dropped terrifyingly quickly initially. A car that started off life costing 40+ grand (including options) is just plain and simple worth more than 3.5K 6 years later. You can see that on autotrader every day of the week. S2s with higher mileage (and MUCH less power) go for much more than that all the time, even from dealers (see Fontain's last sale of an S2). And S2s are more than 10 years old now, even the very youngest ones.

I think these cars will soon be like RS2s and S2s, Urs etc - you pay as much as you feel the car is worth and you get as much as you can when you sell. And you just pray you don't write it off because the insurer will make you cry.

Tim

[grisewos]

Part of the problem has got to be that it's an enthusiasts car. To the untrained eye it looks like every other A4 and therefore at £10k it's not going to stand out on a forecourt as anything other than an outrageously expensive old shape Audi. If a trader hasn't already got a buyer lined-up then he's got to figure that the car is going to hang around for a while.

Like any business they have to work on either low margins and fast turnover or vice versa. Your average dealer probably reckons he can turnover 10 TDi's in the time it will take to shift a S4 hence he'll be looking for 10 times the margin.

Simon