vAuto Appraisal

vAuto Appraisal: vAuto, a Cox Automotive brand, describes its appraisal tool as part of the Provision inventory management platform. The company says Provision uses its Live Market View to help used vehicle managers stock, appraise, price and list vehicles.

vAuto company profile vAuto official website

vAuto Appraisal: vAuto Appraisal and Syndication

The appraisal is where a trade-in or a purchase candidate is valued.

In a release carried by PR Newswire, Auto Dealer Today, Auto Success and Auto Remarketing, vAuto announced two enhancements for its ProfitTime GPS and Provision products: centralized inventory management to support oversight across a dealer group, and a new appraisal experience. The company says the appraisal is meant to help dealers win trade-ins.

The new experience includes a mobile capture feature. According to the release, it captures high-resolution, 360-degree vehicle images and documents damage so that the information passes cleanly to the appraiser, including when the person capturing the car is away from the desk.

The company presents the tool as reducing inconsistencies between appraisers, so that offers are made consistently across a store and reflect the same inputs. It also says the tool supports transparent offers to consumers, which it links to trade capture.

Those are vAuto's stated goals for the tool.

vAuto also publishes resources on appraisal accuracy and on using the Cox Automotive Navigator with trade-in appraisals, which describe how the appraisal draws on Cox Automotive data. A dealer should ask which valuation sources appear on the screen and how wholesale data from Manheim is used, since the Cox family includes both.

The appraisal is one screen among several in Provision. So a store that already uses the platform for pricing gets the appraisal in the same workflow.

A store that does not use Provision should ask whether the appraisal can be used on its own.

For a used car manager, the questions include how the appraisal is passed to the desk and the CRM, how the customer's offer is documented, how photos are stored, how conditions are graded, how a group compares appraisers, and how the tool treats vehicles with few market comparables. The category guide for appraisal tools lists these questions as a scorecard.

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vAuto says Provision uses live market data for appraisals and pricing recommendations. Cox Automotive Navigator is a related tool for trade-in appraisals.

Cox also launched vAuto ProfitTime GPS as a multichannel inventory sourcing system.

An appraiser would ask how market days-supply data adjusts a bid when a vehicle is unusual.

vAuto Appraisal functions
Product or service	Function
vAuto Appraisal and Syndication	Appraisal and listing syndication products the directory tracks.