How VinCount finds private-party cars for dealers.

In Los Angeles, VinCount checks Craigslist's owner listings and the private sellers on Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp every 30 minutes from 6 AM to 11:30 PM Pacific. In the 24 hours to September 29, 2026 it picked up more than 900 new private-party cars there. Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Miami, Atlanta and Phoenix come next. See markets.

The sheet holds cars, trucks, RVs and commercial vehicles. Motorcycles, boats, trailers, parts ads, wanted ads and rentals never reach it.

VinCount reads each ad in full and tags what it claims. The problems come first, in red: doesn't run, an engine or transmission problem, a warning light, flood or fire, body damage, mileage that doesn't add up, a smog or registration problem, a price that isn't the full price, or an ad that describes a different car than its fields. Then the history, the papers, the car and the terms: one owner, records, no accidents, smogged, out of state, manual, must sell, OBO, trades and more.

It marks a car likely dealer when the ad offers financing or a lot's terms, names a business, reads like dealer-website copy, or shares a phone number or a passage of text with other cars. The reason shows beside the mark. See spotting curbstoners for why that matters.

It reads the license plate off the photos and shows the plate cut out of the photo, so you can check the read yourself.

When a VIN, a plate, shared photos or the same ad text proves two postings are one car, the sheet shows one row, aged from the first posting, with each price the seller has asked. A price cut that only shows across reposts is one no single ad shows you.

The buy box down the left filters by make and model, year, price, miles, type, seller, and how recently the car was posted, from the last hour to the last 7 days. Flags narrow it further: nothing wrong in the ad, still up, price dropped, has a VIN, has a plate, bookmarked. Every choice shows how many cars it leaves. New cars arrive on the open sheet on their own.

Click a row and the car opens above the rows: every photo, what VinCount saw, what the seller says, and the ad's full text. The arrow keys step through the cars and their photos.

VinCount does not score deals, suggest offers, estimate values or rank cars by predicted profit. Each of those depends on your shop rates, your lot, your floorplan and how fast you turn cars, and none of that is ours to guess. Arithmetic on two observed numbers, like the ask minus the auction median, is a fact, and the sheet will show it. An estimated gross is not.

When the auction and retail medians arrive, each one prints the number of sales or listings behind it, and opens into the individual cars, so you can throw out the ones that don't match. To do the math yourself, see what to pay for a private-party car and MMR vs private-party price.