M Coupe Buyers Guide

This is a feature I have wanted to add for the longest time.  It will be especially cool once we get an M Coupe registry completed, and we know the approximate location of almost all of them :).

The map is filterable by the listing status (for sale, sold, purgatory) as well as the usual filters of colors, price, mileage, etc. Coupes that have been on the market multiple times will be mapped multiple times. Dealerships that have sold multiple coupes, will have all their coupes layered on top of each other which is not ideal, but there’s not much way around it. The most recently listed of their coupes should be the one on top.

As you probably expect, I had to pretty much custom make all of the icons. I did my best to get the color relatively close to the real color, but it was pretty tough. I even have different icons for arctic/titanium silver and boston/oxford green. Each of the icons is also clickable to get some basic information on the coupe. They then also link to the full listing for each coupe.

As most would guess, the vast majority of the coupes have been located on the coasts with tight clusters in California, Florida and the Northeast (and Cincinnati of course). There’s not much action in Montana, Nebraska or the Dakotas.

Because there are so many icons, the map will be fairly slow to load, so I recommend filtering it. I have also defaulted it to only show current listings by default, but you can also have it display all 700 coupe listings like the above map. Have fun.

TRY IT NOW

For almost the last year, I’ve been able to post my comments on each of the M Coupes currently on the market. I realize that’s kind of selfish of me and other people have thoughts and information to share as well. So now it’s your turn. At the bottom of each of the sales listings there is now a Facebook comment box (don’t worry you don’t have to actually post your comments on Facebook if you don’t want to). Please feel free to share your thoughts, exclamations, additional details, etc. I just ask that you don’t post anything you wouldn’t want posted on your own sales listing.

It’s kind of an experiment, but I decided to create a Facebook page for M Coupe Buyers Guide. It can be another way for people to leave comments, point out new listings, etc.; a better way for people to keep up with my posts if they don’t know how to use RSS; and an alternative means of socializing with the M Coupe community. I plan on posting a link to each of my new articles, any exciting new listings, and my favorite photos.

You can also now “Like” the articles as well as any of the sales listings. If you want to help promote your sale, help a buddy out, or just show your appreciation for a nice coupe, share the listing with your Facebook friends.

Let me know if you have any other ideas or suggestions for me.

After collecting sales data for 6 months, I decided I need to label those coupes that I know are salvage titled as such. This is not only to assist shoppers in purchasing the right car, but I think it will help to more effectively represent the market as a whole. While rebuilt from salvage coupes can come out as good as new, their values will never hold as well as clean title vehicles. As such, they have skewed some of the sales figures and average price statistics. From now on, salvage titled coupes will no longer be included in the average price calculations, price trends charts, or price vs. mileage charts. Please note: coupes without the salvage title label are not necessarily clean titled. I just have not heard any different.

M Coupe Rating Scale

Many people have asked how I determine my ratings. Well, the star ratings on the sale listings are really just my off-the-cuff impressions of the coupe and are relatively subjective, but I do have some rules I try to follow. Here are my general guidelines.

Condition
1 star – Needs significant body or mechanical work
2 star – Repaired salvage, in need of lots of TLC, simple mechanical issues
3 star – Average condition, possibly needing some mechanical or aesthetic work but nothing significant
4 star – Above average condition and well sorted mechanically
5 star – Like it drove off the showroom floor yesterday. Usually reserved for the ultra-low mileage and garage queen/show cars. I also need lots of good photos or to see it in person before I’ll give a coupe 5 stars.

Rarity
1 star – 1 of 100+
2 star – 1 of 50+
3 star – 1 of 25+
4 star – 1 of 5+
5 star – 1 of less than 5
I adjust the ratings somewhat based on how often I see them for sale. For example, I often add a star for alpine white and steel gray which are not super rare numbers-wise but don’t come up for sale very often. I also sometimes add a star for S54 coupes in color combinations also available with S52s. There are other instances when significant modifications justify increased rarity like an S50 engine swap or Dinan signature certificate.

Value
1 star – Priced way over what it should be and should never sell at asking price
2 star – Priced a little bit over what I think it’s worth based on year, condition, mileage, modifications, etc.
3 star – Priced in the neighborhood of where I would recommend someone to price it at
4 star – Priced at what I would consider a really good deal
5 star – Priced in such a way that the buyer is basically stealing it
This is the most subjective of the ratings as different things are worth more to different people. Sometimes coupes to which I give 2 stars sell really fast and others I think are great deals sit on the market a while. Almost all my value ratings will fall between 2 and 4 stars with the only rare exceptions being those that are $10k over- or under-priced (in my opinion).

As we all know, M Coupe owners have great taste in cars. Some of the more fortunate owners also have or have had other cool cars in their garage. While my passion is for M Coupes, I appreciate a wide variety of cars and am always interested in how the coupe compares to other performance cars. A couple people I have talked to recently have given me great, in depth comparisons on their cars, and they are just too good and informative to not share with everyone else. This new article category will feature comparisons of the M Coupe with other performance vehicles as described by the cars owners. If you have the privilege of having owned other cool cars besides you coupe, please share your comparisons with me at jon@mcoupebuyersguide.com and I’ll post them for all to see.

There are quite a few coupes listed on my site that are marketed exclusively on Craigslist. When the Craigslist ads expire (deleted is more obvious), I have no idea if they sold or people just forgot to renew them. Most Craigslist ads don’t include contact information besides the temporary Craigslist email address that expires with the ad. There are other instances when one ad is removed, but other ads are still there and not marked as sold.

I consider these coupes “status unknown” and don’t want them to clutter the more active listings as most of these listings are kind of worthless without any way to contact the seller anymore. While I hate to put any coupes in purgatory, they have either sold, been taken off the market by their sellers, or the seller is just not trying very hard.

You’ll notice that the number of coupe listings appeared to drop significantly the other day. There was not a big sell-off; these coupes were just moved to the newly created “Coupe Purgatory” where they will stay until I find out what became of them. I’d appreciate it if you could look through and see if you know the status of any of them one way or the other. Thanks for your help.

I recently added a few new features to the sales listing and research sections.

Production Information

In my sales listing comments, I often make reference to the number of coupes in a similar color combo to the one for sale. I decided to make this information more available to everyone. Now, when you look at a sales listing you will see “Rarity: 1 of …”. This will show you the number of coupes produced in the same color combination, in the same year, and with or without a sunroof as the listed coupe. Below this line you’ll see a link to “View Product Information”. If the VIN is available on the listed coupe, you will be taken to a page that will show you the coupe’s original colors, year, production date, engine, notable options, a link to get a vehicle history report, a variety of production statistics and its sales history. For those that I do not have a VIN for, it will just show you the general information and production statistics.

The production statistics include:

• Total Number with the Same Engine
• Total Number in the Same Model Year
• Total Number in the Same Exterior Color
• Total Number with the Same Interior Color
• Total Number in the Same Color Combination
• Total Number in the Same Color Combination with or without a Sunroof
• Total Number in the Same Color Combination with or without a Sunroof and with the Same Engine
• Total Number in the Same Color Combination with or without a Sunroof and in the Same Model Year

If you have ideas for more, please send them to me and I’ll add them.

VIN Lookup

Under the new tab “Research”, you will now find the new “VIN Lookup” page. This will allow you to input any M Coupe VIN and see the production information listed above for that coupe.

Forced Induction

The last change I made is highlighting those coupes with superchargers or turbos. I’ve noticed that is a feature some shoppers are looking for specifically, so I thought I’d make it easier for them. It will also help explain the price premium on those coupes versus the naturally aspirated ones. They are now noted with a “Forced Induction” tag. You may also query the coupes for sale or sold by this tag.

Over the past week I’ve been working on a couple more new features for the site.

Market Research

This was a feature that was immediately suggested when I first posted the sale listings. I think it is a great idea and will be really cool to see as time goes on and it matures. What I’m trying to do is provide some useful stats for BMW M Coupe shoppers and fanatics based on my Sale Listings database. As times goes on, this data should get increasingly interesting and useful.

I’m very open to ideas of cools ways to display the data I’ve collected so far. I think I’m only at the tip of the iceberg as far as what I can do with this, but the first couple things I have attempted are as follows:

• Sales Trends
  Charts number of M Coupes for sale and sold over time
• Price Trends
  Charts averate asking price of M Coupes over time
• Price vs. Mileage Charts
  Scatter plot of both currently listed coupes and recently sold coupes with simple trendlines

I think the most useful data in the database is the sale prices of coupes. Aside from Ebay auctions, these are hard to come by unless they are volunteered. Please contact me through my site if you’re willing to contribute the price you recently paid for your coupe. More data is better data.

Find Coupe Stuff

As with any coupe lover, I don’t just love coupes, I like everything to do with coupes. Like many, I regularly watch Ebay and Craiglist for “Coupe Stuff” like scale models, brochures, magazines featuring the coupe, etc. Ebay recently added some ways to embed searches, so I’ve embedded some of my favorites as well as some popular parts and accessories for current or soon-to-be coupe owners. If you have ideas of other searches you think would be handy, let me know. So far I’ve setup:

• Cars
• Parts & Accessories
  • Glovebox Fix
  • Aftermarket Headlights
  • Clear or Smoked Corner/Bumper Lights
  • Springs & Coilovers
  • Wheel Spacers
  • Car Covers
  • LeatherZ Accessories
  • Aftermarket Pedals
  • Grilles
• Repair Manuals
• Scale Models
• Magazines & Brochures
• BMW M Apparel & Merchandise
• BMW & M Banners/Flags

I just added a new feature to my sales listings database, a sold cars list. Just click on the “Recently Sold” link under “Sale Listings” at the top of the page. The listings are still sortable and searchable with new orderable fields added of Sales Date and Sale Price. I think these listings should be helpful for a couple things:

• following the coupe market both in terms of the type of cars selling and their sales prices
• if you see a car listed on one of the classified sites that I don’t have listed in my for sale listings, you can check it against the sold list (I typically update my site faster than most of the classified sites do)

This feature will only be as helpful as the new buyers of these cars are. If you are willing to share the price you recently paid for any of the cars, please let me know. This will be a great help to both buyers and sellers in the future. Hopefully this will give new sellers an idea of what they can price their car at and buyers an idea of what they should pay for their perfect coupe. I will say to buyers, be willing to pay a little over market price for your perfect coupe. You don’t want someone else to buy it before you. Also let me know of any other features I should add to make it more helpful to you.

In a previous post, I listed all the sites I check every day for M Coupes. This week I decided to take it one step further and compile a list of all M Coupes currently for sale in the U.S. from all of those sources. For each car, I also gave my own subjective ratings on Condition, Rarity, and Value as well as a couple comments about what I think of that particular car and anything extra I know of its history. Hopefully this will be a great resource for others searching to find the perfect coupe. Many of the cars are posted on multiple sites, and I will try to link to each listing individually. The price I post is the lowest I’ve seen on all the various listings. If the specific car has been discussed on one of the forums I frequent, I will also try to post those threads for additional information. I plan to update my listings directory daily.

In the future, this will also turn into a recently sold coupe directory as well. If I somehow find out the exact price a car sales for (typically only Ebay listings or cars sold through the forums), I will record it to try and assist people following the market.

Just click on the “Sale Listings” link at the top of the page to access the listings directory. They are default sorted by “Last Updated”, so the most recently listed or updated cars will show up first. Because the directory is new and all the cars were entered out of order, this will not be very effective at first, but as time goes by it should work well. You can choose your own sort order from the drop down list. The choices are: Last Updated, Date Listed, Price, Mileage, Condition Rating, Rarity Rating, Value Rating and Popularity. Click on “Search Listings” to filter the listings by Year, Price, Mileage, Sunroof-Delete, Exterior Color or Interior Color. I did the sort and search results as a url querystring, so once you setup the search and ordering you need you can bookmark it. The side effect is slower processing and no progress bars.

Features I’ve thought of adding in the future are displaying featured, recently added and best deal cars on my main blog page, adding the recently sold directory, and the ability to sign up for email alerts if a coupe is added meeting your specifications.

I’m open to any suggestions people might have or additional information that would be helpful in your search. I was initially thinking of recording the VIN numbers of each car and possibly link them to the M Coupe production database, but I wasn’t sure sellers would appreciate me reposting their VINs. I also decided not to post the seller’s contact information directly. You’ll have to click on the link to one of their listings to get that information.

Please let me know if any of the cars I have listed have sold, if you know of any cars for sale that I’ve missed, or if you have additional information on any of the cars you think would be helpful to potential buyers. If your car is listed and you’d like for me to add additional information or photos, I’d be happy to. All my ratings and comments are subjective, and I’m sure debatable. I kind of just went with my gut based on the photos and my impression of the seller. I’m definitely not an expert and open to suggestions and correction. There is a discussion of the feature on Bimmerforums; feel free to chime in on that thread, PM me, or email me directly with any comments or suggestions.

The only thing I ask is that if the site helped you find your coupe or if you happen to know it helped you sell your coupe, please email me at jon@mcoupebuyersguide.com just to let me know and encourage me to keep this updated. And if you don’t mind sharing the price paid to help other coupe shoppers, that would be nice too. I hope this will be helpful to other M Coupe shoppers and dreamers.