Thursday, April 16, 2015

Find great deals on cars

Executive summary

Jed the owner of Polly Auto is a good friend of mine. Jed started the business a few years ago and has worked hard to make it successful. Polly auto is a buy-here pay-hear used car lot that specializes in cars that are usually less than $10,000. Jed finances the cars that he sells and has a portfolio of loans outstanding. Sometimes customers stop paying and after repeated attempts to contact them if they are not willing to pay Jed has to repossess the vehicle. After repossession he will either work out new terms with the customer or he will resale the car. The margins are quite high because of the high default rate and all of the costs associated with financing people who usually cannot get financed through traditional methods. Polly Auto gets the majority of its inventory from the Auto Auctions; however, Jed is always on the lookout for good deals on used cars. Jed often looks on the local classifieds to try and find vehicles that he can buy and then sell on his lot. This process can be very time consuming and we have talked about how nice it would be to have a computer program that automatically searched the web and notified you of potentially good deals. As I started taking VBA Jed’s problem came to mind and I realized that I could potentially help solve his problem using VBA. I have built a program in excel that does what Jed needs. The program I developed takes parameters about a specific type of vehicle and goes online to the local classifieds and pulls data from cars fitting those parameters. It then pulls market price data about each vehicle using the VIN and compares that data do the asking price. If the car is considered a good deal an email is sent to the user notifying him of the potential good deal and includes the link to the listing. 


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