For decades, the National Auto Auction Association supplied sporadic wholesale sales data from its network of member auctions in a program called AuctionNet. When it was presented, it was usually as a complement to data from other sources.
The association now plans to distribute to its members reports on trends found within AuctionNet data, said Larry Dixon, the association’s vice president of auction data solutions. It plans to share those reports on a more regular basis — at least quarterly, but Dixon’s goal is monthly.
“We’re working on a rollout plan,” he told Automotive News last month.
His expectation is the report distribution will start by May. The reports will focus “quite a bit on volume,” Dixon said.
That would provide a fuller picture when paired with wholesale used-vehicle pricing insights published regularly by Cox Automotive’s auction company, Manheim, and ADESA, the auction network Carvana Co. acquired in 2022.
“We certainly won’t say, ‘Manheim sold X, and ADESA sold Y,’ ” Dixon said. “But we’ll say that overall, here’s what occurred at auction in the last month or the last year to give folks some insight into which way things are trending from a volume standpoint.”
As of April, sales data from 265 of the association’s 329 member auctions in the U.S. feeds the AuctionNet database. Sales from those 265 auctions constitute about 90 percent of total wholesale volume from members.
The association collected data on 6.1 million sales through AuctionNet last year, a spokesperson told Automotive News via email.
In the early 1990s, the association’s position was there was a lack of published information on sale prices at wholesale auctions and that that was a disservice to buyers and sellers, Dixon said.
It then “got the major auction players together to begin compiling and contributing this information … so that the remarketers and auctions and the dealers, the buyers, could operate more efficiently,” Dixon said.
It was similar to how the National Automobile Dealers Association in the 1920s began researching used-vehicle values for its members, then established its Used Car Guide in 1933, Dixon said.
For the majority of its 30-year history, AuctionNet was a joint initiative between the auto auction association and NADA’s Used Car Guide. When J.D. Power acquired the Used Car Guide in 2015, the association worked with it on AuctionNet.
When its partnership with J.D. Power ended in early 2023, the association took AuctionNet in-house.
“There were some additional things that NAAA wanted to do with AuctionNet, and there’s some future products that we have in mind,” Dixon said. “We do have a product road map that we’re working on. The time was right.”
Now AuctionNet is a wholly owned and wholly managed operation within NAAA Services Corp., the association’s for-profit entity, Dixon said.