Should I wholesale a car or retail it — how do I decide?

The decision to wholesale a unit or retail it is a spread, and the spread is readable: the auction band beside the retail band for that exact VIN, with the unit's aging stated in days. When the spread between the two bands is thin and the days on lot are high, the unit points to the lane — the retail upside no longer covers the carry it takes to capture it. When the spread is wide and the days are still low, the unit points to retail — there is real margin left to work and the clock hasn't eaten it yet. That is the whole call, and it is arithmetic, not instinct: retail band minus auction band is what retailing is worth if the unit sells inside its window, and the carry line is what the wait costs while you find out. Read both, dated, and the decision stops being a Tuesday-morning hunch.

Most dispositions are lost before that read ever happens, because the two halves of the decision live in different heads. The retail number is a feeling the sales manager has about what the car "should bring." The auction number is a guess about what the lane paid last time for something like it. Neither is on the same page, neither is dated, and the unit ages between them while floor-plan interest accrues daily and the retail band walks down weekly. The unit that finally runs on a Tuesday runs at whatever the lane lands on, because by then it's a desperation move, not a decision. The cost of that unwritten spread is paid by the dealer who never saw it.

The decision is four lines, not a mood

Put the disposition on one sheet and it resolves into a small set of lines, each filled from a real reading or dashed where no papered figure exists yet:

• Retail band — what the unit brings on the lot, from live comparable sales for the VIN, carried with its source and the timestamp it was set.
• Auction band — what the lane pays for the same unit, from the same valuation engine read dealer-side, not a memory of the last sale.
• The spread — retail band minus auction band. Pure arithmetic, on the page, not felt.
• Carry — days in stock, stated. This is the line the floor never puts in front of you, and it's the one that turns a wide spread into a losing hold.

The spread alone doesn't decide anything. A wide spread on a unit that's been sitting ninety days is not upside — it's upside you've already spent in carry and markdowns, and the wait to capture it costs more than the lane discount. A thin spread on a fresh unit may still be worth retailing because the clock hasn't started charging. The decision is the spread read against the aging: what retailing is worth, minus what the wait to earn it costs. When the carry line eats the spread, the sheet says wholesale in numbers, not in mood.

Where the two bands come from

Both bands are read from the same five-number valuation engine that posts consumer values free at values.vin — retail, private party, trade, wholesale, and auction, each from live comparable sales for the exact VIN, each carried with source and timestamp. The wholesale.vin sheet reads that same engine dealer-side: the retail band and the auction band pulled together for one unit, the spread computed between them, the aging stated in days. No book figure to argue with, no gut number, no call to a friend at the lane — the number is a band with the sales that produced it shown underneath, and it is dated so you know how stale the reading is.

This is the own-data face, and it leads because it costs nothing to read: the decode, the resolved VIN, and the value bands are the free front door. When the decision warrants going deeper — a unit whose story might move the retail band or spook a lane buyer — the full history reads at vhr.vin/{VIN}, because the lane reads the record too, and a title brand or an odometer discrepancy the buyer will find is a discount you'd rather price in than get surprised by. The precision ladder holds here the same as everywhere on the estate: the base band is free and anonymous; a signed-in read narrows to a range with confidence for your specific unit; build-level accuracy with licensed overlays is the paid rung. The number is free; precision is the ladder you climb only as far as the decision needs.

What this door does, and where it stops

wholesale.vin owns one thing: the disposition decision, read at wholesale.vin/{VIN}. It posts the auction band beside the retail band, computes the spread, and states the aging in days — the decision support, dated when made. It does not run the gavel. The lane's own mechanics — runlists, bids, announcements, arbitration — work at auction.vin; this door owns the decision, not the event.

An honest limit worth stating plainly: this door transacts a disposition as principal only behind the dealer-licensing gate — wholesale and used-dealer standing per title-taking state, plus AuctionACCESS and Manheim credentials before it can take an order as principal. Until that gate clears for a given store, the page posts evidence and reads — bands, spread, aging, record — with no order taken here. The decision support is free and open; the principal transaction is gated by the license the law requires, and the page says so rather than implying it can settle what it can't.

When the decision is the lane and the store is credentialed, the unit runs on the wholesale-market rails with Manheim as the papered counterparty, and the run, the sale, and the settlement post as events on the deal record — the same record you read before you decided. A disposition is not an exit from the record; it's an event on it, and the unit's history travels to the next buyer with the VIN.

To read the disposition on a real unit, the bands and the spread sit at wholesale.vin/{VIN}. For the full dealer desk around it — appraise, record, wholesale, move, one entrance keyed to the unit — that's dealers.vin. And when the decision comes back retail-or-cash rather than lane, the firm-offer intake that feeds the same spine reads at offers.vin, where a consumer's car and a dealer's acquisition land on one record.