Dealerly vs doing it by hand

Manual sourcing works — dealers have done it forever. The question is what your evenings are worth.

The manual routine

Scroll Facebook, Gumtree and eBay across saved searches. Open each promising listing. Check the MOT history on the government site. Sanity-check the mileage. Look for write-off tells in the photos. Find comparable retail listings. Estimate recon. Decide. Repeat — across the roughly 17,408 listings that entered Dealerly’s scan window in the last ~36 hours alone.

Done properly, that is 10–15 minutes per candidate. Twenty candidates is an evening, and the good ones sold while you were checking the bad ones.

What automation changes

• Coverage: 7 marketplaces scanned every 5 hours — including the ones you skip when you are tired.
• Checks before the shortlist: MOT history, DVLA records and mileage consistency run on every scored listing — the 15 minutes per car happens before you ever see it.
• Comparable-backed margins: each candidate priced against real dealer-retail comps for its cohort, with the working shown.
• The kill-list: rollbacks and undisclosed write-off categories are demoted automatically — the costly mistakes are the ones you never see.

What automation does not change

You still view the car. You still negotiate. You still know your local market better than any model. Dealerly’s job is to make sure the car you drive out to see was worth the diesel — across all 180 pipeline runs to date, the average modelled profit on BUY-ranked listings has been £7,360 (modelled, not guaranteed).