'Tax Time ' Impacts Auctions

There continues to be much talk on the lanes regarding the “spring market” and this being “tax time,” according to the recent "Beggs on the Market Report," presented by Ricky Beggs, VP and managing editor of Black Book. 

"This year, the electronic filing date was delayed about a week, thus the returns were a little slow flowing in. I have had several dealers say anxious buyers are now coming in with checks in hand," Beggs commented. "The demand apparently is carrying over to the lanes as most of the Black Book survey personnel mentioned in their auction summary reports that there was great activity, steady bidding, and prices that were mostly up.

Overall, the actual results of a full week of market analysis, sure supports most of the comments from the survey personnel. Black Book ended up with 41 percent of the adjustments being increases to the previously published values, the strongest point over the past six weeks.

The overall average segment change on the cars at -$24 was the lowest declining weekly amount since the week ending May 11, 2012. Getting to the -$24 average segment change included increases of $8 and $5 on the Entry Level Cars (ELC) and the Full-size Cars (FSC), respectively. There were four more car segments that declined by -$20 or less for the week. Those were the Luxury Level Cars (LLC), the Upper Mid-size Cars (UMC), the Compact Cars (SCC) and the Entry Mid-size Cars (EMC). You could assume that spring time and tax time might be appearing on the cars.

The trucks took a slightly different turn this past week with the overall average segment change of -$33 being the largest declining level over the last 4 weeks when that amount averaged -$26. There were 6 segments that declined by less than $20 including the Compact Crossovers (CXU) at -$17 and the Mid-size Pickups (MPT) at -$16 and then all the way to the lowest declining segment of -$1 for the Full-size SUVs (FSU).

"If you are driving a plug-in electric car, the fluctuation in the price of gasoline and diesel is probably putting a small smile on your face. In the most recent report the price of gas increased $0.18 to $3.54, about $0.06 higher than this time a year ago," Beggs reported. "Diesel increased by $0.09 during the last week and topped out at $4.02. Diesel didn’t top the $4 level at the beginning of 2012 until the week of February 27."

Looking at a truck-related segment that over the past three months has been up and down and not in tune with the overall segment change levels is the Compact SUVs (CSU). This segment paints a pretty diverse pattern. It has had a couple of weeks of increasing values and also a couple of weeks with greater than -$40 weekly declines.

View this weeks video below: