It’s frustrating being a car buyer right now. Tick everywhere. Not knowing who is marking something or being told a price by phone or email and then get marked when you go to the dealership, can be frustrating. Luckily, someone out there is backing all of us. That person created a website Nationwide tick tracking and listing they are in one place.
The site is called Markups.org. Friend of the site Zerin Dube on Twitter, although we don’t know who created it. Who made it, in spite of, put their reasons in a small post called Why site tracking? on the site’s forum:
My hope is to have a single source to post publicly about the price increases dealers and retailers are adding to their merchandise. maybe this will keep them a bit more honest and competitive? Ha!
The site is simple but great. You can search for reviews by state, brand, vehicle year and even the name of the dealer if you have the info.
Clicking on one of the listings gives you a little more detail, with things like possible photos of the vehicle, dealer name, and the vehicle’s design and trim.
The best part of all of this (aside from the existence of the site itself): Anyone can create an account and upload any markup you come across.
A community-backed website to track how greedy dealers are? This has quite a large potential, especially with the market right now. If there are enough people behind this, it could work in favor of the buyer. While some agents are unaffected by bad publicity, pooling their greed in one place can hurt their business. And if everyone has rallies and is hurting the business, those reviews are likely to pop up. Looks like I’ll be a bit busy adding listings for this over the next few days.
