Automotive sales and inventory data

What is MarketCheck?

MarketCheck crawls dealership websites across North America every day and turns what it finds into structured, VIN level records of vehicle listings, inventory, sales, and pricing. It covers over 100,000 dealer sites and roughly 6 million unique VINs a day, spanning both franchise and independent dealers. On Dewey, that daily crawl is published as MarketCheck's Compass Automotive feed.

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What academic researchers should know about MarketCheck automotive data

On Dewey, MarketCheck publishes two companion datasets built from that same daily crawl. Auto Inventory Data is a daily VIN level panel of every vehicle listed for sale on a dealership website across the United States and Canada, with 39 fields per vehicle and about 13.2 billion rows dating back to 2017, covering vehicle identity, mileage, listed price, MSRP, MarketCheck's own modeled price measures, days on market, dealer and dealership group identity (including mapped stock tickers for publicly traded dealer groups), and geography down to the ZIP code. Auto Sales Data mirrors that structure for inferred sales, with 37 fields and about 334 million rows. A sale is inferred roughly a week after a vehicle disappears from the inventory panel, so recorded sale prices reflect the vehicle's final listed price rather than a verified transaction price, which is worth noting for any study treating them as realized sale values. Both datasets pseudonymize vehicle identification numbers and go through quality checks that catch implausible values like six figure mileage or prices far outside a vehicle's category.

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Why academic researchers choose MarketCheck on Dewey

MarketCheck's daily crawl already does the hard work of turning 100,000+ dealership websites, each with its own layout and update rhythm, into one consistent VIN level record. That kind of scale and standardization is normally built for dealer networks, lenders, and investment funds tracking automotive markets in real time, not for a research project. On Dewey, academic researchers get the same daily granularity, historical depth back to 2017, and North American coverage, without having to crawl or clean a single dealer site themselves.

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MarketCheck academic research ideas and use cases

Nowcasting the auto sector. Traditional financial statements are lagging indicators, and by the time an automaker reports quarterly earnings the market has often already moved on. Multiplying daily sales velocity by average transaction price produces a shadow revenue estimate by make, model, or OEM weeks before the actual number posts, a natural application for macroeconomics and forecasting research built around high frequency proxies for economic activity.

Pricing power and discounting behavior. Tracking the gap between MSRP and the listed price over time reveals how much leverage an OEM or dealer actually has. When average discounts widen across a lineup, gross margins are under pressure; when vehicles sell at or above sticker, pricing power is intact. That kind of longitudinal pricing data supports research on market power, price discrimination, and how competition plays out at the dealer level.

The EV transition. Comparing EV and gas inventory levels, days on market, and discount depth by OEM turns the shift to electric vehicles into something measurable rather than anecdotal. Researchers can test whether stated EV strategy on earnings calls lines up with what is actually moving, or piling up, on dealer lots, and use that gap to study corporate disclosure and market expectations.

Dealer level market structure. With dealer identity attached to every listing, researchers studying publicly traded dealer groups such as AutoNation, Lithia, and Penske can compare inventory discipline, acquisition strategy, and margin pressure across chains, or study regional demand shifts and used vehicle price decay as a signal of brand equity.

Earnings and disclosure research. Because MarketCheck's inventory and sales records update daily while corporate filings update quarterly, the gap between the two is itself a research question. Studies on earnings management, management credibility, and market efficiency can use the daily data to check whether what executives say about demand matches what is actually happening on the lot.

Supply chain and tariff exposure. When new inventory listings outpace vehicles leaving dealer lots, that is a leading signal of overproduction or a disrupted supply chain. Comparing that build up across OEMs and time periods gives supply chain and trade researchers a way to study how tariff changes or production disruptions show up downstream, on the lot, before they appear in company disclosures.

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