The Power of Precision: Why Your Appraisal Accuracy Matters More Than Ever | vAuto

For automotive dealerships, appraisals are more than a routine step in acquiring inventory. They are a pivotal touchpoint that directly drives your potential profitability for a vehicle, your operational efficiency and customer trust. 

Yet, the industry faces a common challenge—too often, appraisals remain inconsistent, subjective, and detached from measurable strategy. It’s like every appraiser does their thing, and dealers hope it all comes out in the wash.

At vAuto, we advocate a different approach, one that combines an overall strategy to your process and execution to more consistently appraise vehicles for the right money, gain efficiency and satisfy customers. The seeds of the new approach come from current appraisal process deficiencies.

Appraisal Deficiencies and their Cost

According to insights from Dale Pollak's latest book, Invested, appraisals are the “last remaining Wild, Wild West in almost every dealership.” Some stats:

70 percent of dealers allow appraisers to use default reconditioning costs for more than half of the vehicles they appraise;

40 percent of appraisals with default recon costs estimates are off by $1,000 or more;

Cost to Market and Look to Book averages across appraisal teams vary widely.

In Invested, Pollak highlights how these factors all signal symptoms of a larger problem: Because dealers haven’t had a way to define what the right money should be for every vehicle they appraise, appraisers do it themselves. On top of that, the way individual appraisers approach each vehicle and customers isn’t based on a dealer’s established strategy and process. Instead, it’s based on how the appraiser has learned to do the job and the interest/time an individual puts into each vehicle appraisal. In this environment, it’s really no surprise that dealers can’t, and don’t, require a more accountability-, process- and strategy-consistent method for managing appraiser performance and its impact on their business.

The Shifting Landscape of Appraisals

Beyond the appraisal process deficiencies present in many dealerships, there are external pressures hitting dealers from consumers themselves.

Their desires are changing, if they haven’t completely changed already. Recent Cox Automotive consumer research finds that a growing number of vehicle owners seek out valuation offers before they engage dealers. The awareness among today’s consumers of how much their vehicle is worth reflects a level of market transparency that didn’t exist in recent years past. Today, it’s not uncommon for vehicle owners who engage dealers to have two or more active offers on their vehicle before your appraiser has a chance to evaluate it. 

But here’s a bright spot: The research also shows that when dealers provide an appraisal experience that a) meets customers’ expectations and needs and b) minimizes the distrust many consumers, based on past experience, hold about dealer-conducted appraisals, they often see a majority of appraisal offers (55 percent) accepted without any negotiation.

That’s an opportunity for every dealer to at least consider, if not explore, how they might reimagine their appraisal strategy, process and oversight to seize it.

How vAuto's Newly Enhanced Appraisal Experience Changes the Game

As Cox Automotive and vAuto developers considered how to help dealers move past long-standing deficiencies in their appraisal processes, they focused first on how to help dealers gain mutual trust and understanding with their customers about the condition and value of their vehicle.

Built on the foundation of vAuto’s Provision and ProfitTime GPS systems, the enhanced appraisal experience includes several key features:

• Mobile-Friendly Capture: Quickly document a vehicle’s condition with on-the-go photo capture and customizable damage assessments.

• More Precise Recon Estimation Tools: Gain clarity on reconditioning costs by calculating accurate figures specific to each vehicle’s condition and needs.

• Enhanced Transparency: Seamlessly incorporate Kelley Blue Book® Instant Cash Offer, ensuring appraised values align with an industry standard consumers trust.  

• Comprehensive Insights: Mobile VIN-scanning and easy OBDII integration simplify the process of gathering and analyzing essential vehicle data.

• Customer-Friendly Presentation: Generate a clear, professional offer presentation that builds consumer confidence.

As Pollak notes in Invested, the new appraisal experience can go even further with the addition of predictive data science available through ProfitTime GPS that helps dealers strategically define the right money for each vehicle and hold their appraisers accountable to it and the critical steps of their appraisal process.

Ready to Improve Your Appraisal Process?

Appraisals don’t have to feel like the Wild West. With vAuto’s new appraisal experience, your dealership can reduce costly errors, simplify workflows and build customer satisfaction and trust with every offer. With that, you’re on your way to bringing in more customers and inventory appraised for the right money.