Recently, I had a case where an adjuster was negotiating an inherent lost market value claim based on values and condition descriptions found in Kelley Blue Book. The amount of inherent lost value that the adjuster was willing to pay was about $4k less than what my research and opinion came out to. Obviously, I argued that Kelley was not accurate, and naturally, the adjuster requested a synopsis on why I believed that using Kelley Blue Book was not a reliable method for researching inherent lost market value, or DV as it is becoming common to call it (diminished value).
I happily obliged the adjuster, and here in this blog entry, I will re-cap why I think using Kelley Blue Book (or any other online valuation guide) to calculate DV is a severely lacking and inaccurate method.