GAINESVILLE, GA – The first week of 2011 is now in the history books with a good week of activity at the auctions across the country. According to Ricky Beggs, VP and managing editor for Black Book, “There were mixed comments as some auctions were reported as ‘active and strong’ while a couple of comments from the Black Book survey personnel thought things were ‘weaker than expected’. One even said ‘it seemed like a year-end mentality, not a new-year aggressiveness’. There were even more comments regarding how some dealers thought things were getting stronger and that the holiday sales were pretty good and additional inventory was needed.”

When looking at the results of the changes made by Black Book editors the first week of January, there was an increased need for inventory as the last three weeks had 50 percent or more of the adjustments being increases, culminated with 63 percent this past week.

“This is a reflection of more aggressive bidding,” Beggs said. “We haven’t reached this level since the week ending May 7, 2010. This time last May was also the last time, other than last week, where the total changes were a positive number.”

The 10 car segments showed improvement this past week. Even though all 10 segments declined for the week, there were three segments where the weekly change was less of a drop than the previous week. This was led by a $70 improvement within the Premium Sporty Cars (PSC) at -$66 this past week.

“What makes this even more impressive is that this is only the 2nd week since back in July 2010 where this segment declined less than $100 for the week,” Beggs noted. “The other two segments showing improvement were Entry level Cars (ELC) and Near Luxury Cars (NLC).”

Even with the increases in gasoline prices in recent weeks, 10 of the 14 truck segments went up in value for the week and the overall truck change was a positive $11. Two segments with significant increases were the Luxury SUVs (LSU) up by $87 and the Full-size Pickups (FPT) which increased by $36. Two of the truck segments that declined in value this week actually dropped less than they had the previous week, Full Size SUVs (FSU) and Mid Size CUVs (MXU).

The two segments with the largest declines were from opposite ends of the size spectrum including the Full-size Crossovers (FXU) at -$50 and the much smaller Compact SUVs (CSU) at -$24.

A variety of 24 different 2011 and 2010 models received their first market driven values, from the small Scion XB Release Series 7.0, a popular minivan, the Honda Odyssey EX-L, and all the way up to a Porsche Panamera.

“We are all excited to be full steam ahead into the 2011 market, focused on digging deeper into the market data, spreading our searches even further as we will be adding another five to six more auctions this year to the already significant 59 we physically cover every week,” said Beggs. “We are also committing additional time to watching even more auctions online, allowing our editors to watch auctions from all over the country.”