How To Calculate Second-hand Car Price Using Our Car Value Calculator

If you are not happy with the results, maybe you can try to further filter the results using the variant of your car. This is especially useful if your car has the highest variant in that model. Play around with the keywords until you are happy with the results

Try it below. Enter variant keywords for Toyota Vios or just hit Filter Now button.

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Before I give you the reason why I said a strong yes to that question, I want you first to imagine that you already won this game of life. Imagine that you are very successful financially with a very good relationship with your family and friends. Your financial state has given you the capacity to have a beautiful house, multiple properties and of course, the car of your dreams. 

[Photo Credit: Pietro de Grandi]

Now that you are in this state, it is more than likely that you, your family and your friends are very fond of another luxury in life, quality wine. Years of tasting and trying different types of wine have trained your taste buds to pick only the best wine available. To help ease this meticulous wine choosing process, you need a trustworthy reference that would recommend and judge the right wine for you. One of the top wine competitions would be the California State Fair Commercial Wine Competition.  

Judging wine is a big part of the wine industry. As a result of this judging process, they give a gold medal for the wine that produces the excellent taste, smell, texture and other factors that that type of wine should produce. This would be the best wines. Then they give a silver medal for good wine, the next lower level would be the bronze medal, most of the wine will have no star if they perform poorly according to the judges. These medals are what will attract most of the customers and eventually enable the supplier of the wine to increase its price. 

The very basis of awarding the medal depends on the Judges whom we deemed as wine connoisseur, and with a lot of integrity. But, you may actually ask yourself, do these judges have a consistent judgment throughout the competition? Who judges the judges? 

[Photo Credit: Burst]

It turns out, they did ask these questions. What they did to test the judges is that they set up the competition where out of the 50 glasses of wine, 12 of these wine glasses will come from the same bottle of wine and the rest of the 32 glasses will be the usual entries to the competition. The assumption is that if the judges are consistent and with high integrity in their decision, their judgment on that 12 exactly the same wine would be very similar. 

As a normal pessimist, you might have guessed that the judges made a mostly poor judgment on these 12 bottles. It turns out, you are right.  

For a few of the 12 identical glasses of wine, a judge gave gold medals. With the same judge, he also gave no medal on some of the entries which have exactly the same wine! Only about 15% of the judges have a consistent judgment on the 12 identical wines. But! In the following year, this same set of 15% of the judge is again not consistent with their judgment. 

If you notice, the point that I am trying to drive here is that the decision of a judge, that is supposed to have integrity, is very unpredictable. It is not even biased because when you say their judgment is biased, you can predict that they are biased positively or negatively. In this case, you can't really say their direction and essentially that is what we call the Noise in decision making. 

In the same way as judging the quality of the wine, estimating the price of a second-hand car is also greatly affected by noise. Even if you feel that this person is already seasoned in car dealing, it is safe to say that they are still influenced by the noise of decision making.  

Noise can come from different things. It may be that on one or two occasions, you are successful at selling this car at this price. That would now be your main anchor point and you will probably recommend cars at that same level. But we failed to know that there are thousands of similar cars that are on sale for that car. The decision can also be affected by your relationship with that car expert. It might be that they have other motives, such as gaining more profit, in prescribing the price of the car. Or they just don't like you or adore you too much, that will also affect how much price they would recommend the price for that car. 

In engineering, one way to reduce noise is to average the data points and the results would be the closest answer to the query. They tested this idea by having a survey in the United States and they asked the Americans, what percentage of airports in the whole world are in the United States of America. It turns out that averaging the answer of the people who took the survey is very close to the actual answer to the question. This is what we call the Wisdom of the Crowd. 

[Photo Credit: Connor Williams]

Going back to the question, is this price estimate accurate? Yes, because the wisdom of the crowd which came from all the similar car prices in the market is better than any other opinion of experts in the car dealership industry. 

By getting the car prices of tens of thousand cars on sale in the Philippines we are developing the Wisdom of the Crowd to you through our car value calculator.  

1. Toyota Vios - Isn't it obvious? My wife even guessed this right. As this is the most common car you are seeing in the street, thus, this is most likely be the top car to be traded in the 2nd hand car market. This car has been in trading for a long time. Let's dive into the data to see how long exactly has it been traded in the market. Read more about this here. 

2. Honda Civic - This is interesting to us because our impression of the Honda Civic is that it is a notch above the everyday car. We were expecting that this car may be a bit rarer because of its price category. But remember, this model has been around for a while and has gone through several facelifts. This recent impression may just be coming from their latest revamp of their style which caught the eye of many car buyers. We have more impression on the price statistics of Honda Civic model in this data-driven story.     

3. Toyota Innova - As the family version of the Toyota Vios, this car is highly visible as well in the 2nd hand car market. Same with the Toyota Vios, there are more interesting data that you can see for Toyota Innova in this data-driven story.   

4. Toyota Fortuner - I am starting to feel now that we are in a Toyota filled cars in the Philippines. From the everyday car to an everyday day family car like Toyota Innova, we have graduated to the more premium model of Toyota Fortuner.   

5. Toyota Corolla - This entry is the representation of our senior car owners as most of the cars being sold for this model are in the older years. 

6. Honda City - This is the closest competitor to the Toyota Vios relative to its category and price range. Unfortunately, this is not as popular with the Toyota Vios as they are five places away from each other in our top ten.  

7. Honda CR-V - The Honda CR-V had an impression of being one of the pricey sides mainly because this model gives off style and sophistication. Being in the top ten most traded cars in the Philippines, it shows that their strategy is still effective even in the 2nd hand car market.  

8. Mitsubishi Montero Sport - This is the first entry of the Mitsubishi Maker in our top 10. This model has been around for a while but the boom of this model came when they rev up their design which the market really liked.  

9. Mitsubishi Adventure - When I mention this model, most of the time, the car experts always say 'Matibay talaga kotse na yan' (This car is very durable). That statement has a foundation just for the fact that this model has been tried and tested for several years. If it were not from the ban of Euro 2 models in the Philippines, I'm sure this model will still be in production. But as of now, it is still very actively traded in the 2nd hand car market.   

10. Toyota Hi-Ace - This is the only entry in the van category. The maker is still Toyota which is another testament to its brand dominance. This model has a good interest in the car-buying market as some savvy business people will opt to use a second-hand van for public transportation purposes because of its cost-effectiveness. 

One observation we see here is that these models have their names for a time. Even if the manufacturer revamps the visuals, engine, and other features, they still maintained their model name. This is a good strategy as they protected their brand in the market which resulted in them being included in our Top 10 most traded cars in the Philippines.  

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One of the drivers of this website is the fact that the vehicles in the Philippines are growing at a fast rate. In the past size years, from 2017 to 2019, the number of vehicles in the Philippines has grown at an average rate of 9.5% per year. These cars came from different parts of Luzon, Visayan, and Mindanao. As of 2019, there are more than twelve million cars registered in the Philippines. Even if only a fraction of these twelve million cars will end up in the buy and sell car market, these car owners would need a guide on how to properly trade their car at the right market. CarSurvey.ph wants to serve these people and most especially, you! 

The twelve million cars in the Philippines are continuously being used and driven but unfortunately, each of these cars does not depreciate at the same rate. Each has its own depreciation rate and is very difficult to assess. But using the Wisdom of the Crowd, this will be our best tool to assess our cars.  

Looking further at the data, it is interesting to note which cities in the Philippines have most of the cars. It is almost a given fact that Metro Manila would have the highest number of vehicles. Metro Manila even has more than twice the number of registered Motor Vehicle (MV) than the region that follows it, which is the CALABARZON area.  

The next group of cities that has the most register vehicles came from the CALABARZON (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, and Quezon). The bulk of the cars would most likely come from the cities of these provinces which are Cavite City, Imus, Trece Martires, Lucena City.   

The third group of provinces that has the most cars came from the provinces of Bulacan, Pampanga, Nueva Ecija, Aurora, Bataan, Tarlac, Zambales. There are many buzzing cities here as well that will most likely house most of the cars in this region. This includes cities like Malolos, San Fernando, Tarlac City, Angeles, and Olongapo City.  

These three regions are clustered together near our country's capital. This is not surprising and is also behind the reason why there is massive congestion in traffic around these regions.  

The next set of the region where most of the cars are located are on the next group of island, Visayas. I'd let you guess which city where the cars will most likely be...  

I'm sure you thought of Cebu City and this is correct as the Central Visayas is the fourth cluster of MV registered vehicles. Together with Cebu City are other beautiful cities such as Tagbilaran City, Dumaguete, Lapu-Lapu, and Mandaue.  

If we jump to the third group of islands in the Philippines, Mindanao, it is a bit challenging to guess which region would have the largest cluster of cars. What do you think? Which would it be?  

It is the region of our own president, the Davao Region. To point it out, Davao does not even come next from the Central Visayas region, it is actually the 7th region of the most number of cars. If you visit Mindanao, congested traffic is virtually unheard of. This is most likely because of the vast land available to the Mindanao people and lesser cars situated in this area.  

In summary, below is the distribution of registered motor vehicle represented by the intensity of colors. You can see that there is not a fair distribution of car owners in the Philippines. Most of it are in Metro Manila and the regions around it. One good thing that we can do is to spread the cars aross different regions. In a little way, CarSurvey.ph can help that by setting the right market price for every car trade that happend in the Philippines.  

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