Researching With The Kelley Blue Book

You might already know the kind of car that you will settle for, and just nothing else will do. This can give you a tremendous edge, as there are numerous ways to research a particular type of automobile. Say, for instance, your heart’s desire is a Chevy Malibu, and the year can be 1998 up to the present. One of the best places to start is the Kelley Blue Book. You can review the listings of nearly any automobile make and model, giving you the estimated worth of a car in almost any condition. It really is the used car “bible”, so to speak. One caveat though, finding an up to date copy of the actual book can be a daunting task. Most car dealerships will have one, but it can be a pain to get them to let you browse through it, as their business is to sell cars and most of them would rather not have potential customers seeing the actual value of their merchandise.

The best alternative, if you have internet access, is the Kelley Blue Book web site www.kbb.com. If you do not have internet access, try your local library, it’s well worth the effort. Almost all libraries now have internet access that you can sign up for and use the internet for a period of time. Be warned that the site itself has a lot of intense graphics which will cause it to load quite slowly on a dial-up connection, but aside from that it is a wonderful site for doing any kind of car research. Using the Kelley Blue Book site you can even do a search for a particular make and model, where you can enter your zip code and specify a range of miles. The search will return all of the automobiles that match your criteria, and will include dealerships as well as classified ads. Results will show you the year, model, asking price, mileage, who is selling it, the color and the distance from your area. Many listings have a photo so that you can click on the icon and see a real picture of that particular vehicle. In addition to all of that, each listing has a check box beside it so that you can “save” any one. This allows you to look through all listings and filter out the ones that do not fit your preferences, so that you can go back and show only the ones that you checked as saved. This is not to say that ALL cars in the area will be listed, but you can believe that you will find most of them there, and it is a very good place to start if you really must have a certain car. Another benefit is that you get a good feel for what an average price is which will help a lot when you find the same car somewhere else.

The search feature of the Kelley Blue Book web site is impressive. My search for the Chevy Malibu from 1998 to the present within 20 miles of my area yielded 36 cars of varying mileage and price. That’s definitely a good start, as I automatically had every car listed at my fingertips. Of course, you can refine your search to narrow the list down considerably. The advanced search lets you specify any year or years, so I could conceivably find only cars made in 1998 or 2000, skipping 1999 completely (maybe that was a bad year for Malibus). You can search within a particular price or mileage range as well, or narrow the search to anywhere from 10 to 500 miles from you. There is even an option to see only listings from 1, 3 or 7 days, the last 2 weeks or the last month.

All in all, the Kelley Blue Book site is a storehouse of information about any kind of vehicle. For getting a head start on your car search it is most highly recommended.

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