Car For Sale Simulator 2023 – Prices, Customers, and Lowballers

A breakdown of how pricing works when selling, how it influences frequency and value of customers’ offers, and strategies to maximize profit and/or ease of sales.

Before We Start

The information in this guide is based on findings from version 0.1.42-0.1.44. The game is early access and things are subject to change as the game’s mechanics are tweaked/balanced.

This guide will predominantly speak as though you’ve unlocked the Better Bargain 2 and Best Price skills, the latter of which can help you determine the exact value of your car and is very important in pricing efficiently instead of guessing.

What Primarily Influences Value?

Almost all the modifiers to value only affect the prices at which vehicles are sold to you, not when you sell to a customer. When a car is created, it is given a base value. Damage, dirt, mileage, features are added onto the car randomly at the time it is sold and that affects the seller’s asking price, which is capped at the base value but can be much lower if the car is in rough shape.

Once the car is in your hands, however, the car is valued at the base value, which can never be lower than what you paid for it. Thus, buying beat up, badly painted cars with high mileage will earn you a huge profit while pristine cars with low mileage and fancy features only a modest profit.

Cleaning and refueling a car does nothing for value. Adding a picture or title to your posting does nothing as well. Repairing, repainting, and tuning a car adds very little value. Apart from getting achievements, if your goal is to profit quickly or climb the leaderboards then you should just sell cars as-is (or be a cheater and save scum poker, whatever floats your boat).

An example car’s sell value:
Fiyay 131
71.5k km mileage

10% dmg 35% painted: 195.5-363.2k
0% dmg ($150 repair) 0% painted ($175 respray): 195.9-364k
Tuning Racing,ABS,Turbo,NOS ($1240): 196.9-365.7k

So all that work fixing up the car, repainting it, and adding cool features only netted us an extra 2.5k max sale price at the cost of 1.5k, or an extra 1k profit at best. In that same time we could have bought 2-3 more cars and thrown them in our lot.

And to salt the wound, driving the fixed/tuned car into the car lot walls until engine breaks
70% damage: 196.2k – 364.3k — a loss of only 700-1400 for totally trashing a perfect car.

Now onto the fun part, selling people our dirty clunkers for high prices!

Pricing Cars for Sale

TL;DR Version

If a customer accepts your price without bargaining, that means they were willing to pay more.

If a lowballer is offering less than half of your listing price, you’re way overpricing your car.

Get bargain 2 and best price

Value strategy: List all cars for the lowest orange price and bargain all customers to $1 below asking price. We will get 5-6 good customers per day, and 62.2% of good customers will accept.

Efficiency strategy: List all cars for the highest average price and bargain all customers to $1 below our asking price. We will get the max, 6-7 good customers per day, and 100% of them will accept. Only lowballers will refuse.

Burning money leaderboard climbing strategy: List all cars for 10% below lowest price shown and nobody will haggle with you, even lowballers.

Detailed Explanation

The Best Price skill gives you this gauge when you go to list a car for sale, which is vague, but actually allows you to determine the exact value of your car when you know what it means. Here’s what it actually means:

The price gauge shows the value of the car from 70% to 130%
70%-85% Lower Price
85%-93% Below Average
93%-107% Average
107%-115% Above Average
115%-130% High Price

There are two types of customers that enter your lot, good customers and lowballers.
Good customers offer you 93%-107% of the car’s value (the average range)
Lowballers offer you 65.1-88.35% (70-95% of 93%)

You will always get 3-5 lowballers per day. The amount of good customers you get depends on your asking price.
<110%: 6-7
<120%: 5-6
<130%: 2-3
<140%: 1
>=140%: 0

For selling, bargain skill lets you ask for the following
Amateur (1): 7% more
Apprentice (2): 12% more
Master (3): 17% more

This is slightly lower than when buying, which is 5%/10%/20%. Bargaining is subject to rounding, so always add or remove a little bit when buying or selling.

You cannot negotiate higher than your original asking price, so if you want maximum value then it’s in your best interest to slightly overprice your cars — to the extent that you can tolerate the loss in foot traffic.

The max possible price you can sell a car for is the best possible offer (107%) * the best possible bargain (17%) to give you a sale price of 125.19%, or a range of 108.81-125.19% with good customers.

Using this knowledge, we can implement a couple of easy selling strategies with max bargain skill.

List all cars for the lowest orange price (115%) and bargain all customers to $1 below our asking price. We will get 5-6 good customers per day, and 62.2% of good customers will accept.

List all cars for the highest average price (107%) and bargain all customers to $1 below our asking price. We will get the max, 6-7 good customers per day, and 100% of them will accept. Only lowballers will refuse.

Don’t care about money because you’re rich, just want to sell cars for leaderboard rank? List all cars for the lowest price (70%) and even the stingiest of lowballers will accept $1 below asking price with bargain. List for 10% less than the lowest price shown and lowballers won’t even haggle with you. 100% of customers, good and bad, will outright buy the car.

If you want maximum value and are willing to pull out a calculator and turn down good customers regularly, list just below 120% and you still get 5-6 good customers per day.
~31.7% of good customers will pay up to 120%