Most vendor conversations begin with what a dataset covers. MarketCheck on the other hand will tell you, in some detail, what its data can’t see.
The company, founded in 2012, aggregates vehicle listings from public dealer advertising across the United States and Canada, and used vehicles in the UK. It captures roughly 6 million unique vehicle identification numbers (VINs) per day, cleans and de-duplicates them, and resolves the result into a daily picture of inventory, pricing and sales. Inventory carries a one-day lag; sales are inferred with a seven-day lag once a vehicle has left every site it was listed on. For institutional investors looking at the auto sector, this offers an advantage, says Bryant Sheehy, Head of Investment Funds Practice at MarketCheck, in conversation with Market & Alt Data Insight.
“Public dealership groups and roughly 24 OEMs report financial results quarterly, but the underlying retail market moves every day,” he notes. “Between reports, we track changes in inventory, sales velocity, days on market, pricing, mix, and turnover. That’s the value of nowcasting: it gives investors a more current view of market direction and developing trends. These signals don’t replace a full company model, especially for OEMs, but they can help investors update their assumptions before the next earnings report.”
Bridging the Data Gap
The mechanism is straightforward. A vehicle is listed across several sites at once; machine learning identifies the duplicates and locates where the car physically sits. When it drops off all of them and stays off, MarketCheck ages it seven days and records it as a sale, a threshold the firm says it has validated empirically and that matches how dealerships log transactions in practice. Waiting longer tightens the confidence but costs time, and for an investor trying to get ahead of a print, time is of course most of the value.Registration data, the ground truth of a vehicle changing hands, is comprehensive but slow, often arriving 90 to 120 days after the fact. Dealer management system data covers a sample of franchise dealers, projected to the wider population. MarketCheck aims to occupy the ground those leave open by providing actionable data faster than registrations, more granular than a projected sample, and available at the level of the individual vehicle.
Embracing Transparency
David McKay, Senior VP for Market Expansion, is direct about what the company does not hold. “Every dataset has limits. What matters is knowing exactly where they are,” he says. “Our data covers the retail market and depends on vehicles being listed online. That means we won’t see a small local seller without a website, wholesale transactions, or most build-to-order vehicles because they’re presold and never listed. We also don’t capture the full new-vehicle inventory of Tesla, Rivian, or Lucid because they show only representative vehicles online. Once those vehicles return to the retail market as used, though, we capture virtually all of them. We’re very clear about where our coverage is strongest, where it’s lighter, and how analysts should account for that.”
The electric-vehicle gap is the one that may give a certain kind of investor pause. A fund building a position around the EV transition is often most interested in those direct-sales names (Tesla, Rivian, Lucid) that post no genuine new-vehicle inventory to dealer sites and so sit in the dataset’s blind spot on the new side. MarketCheck’s answer is that the used market fills much of it: once these cars change hands a second time they are captured almost completely, and new and used EV pricing move closely enough that the used read carries information about the new. Whether that substitutes for a missing new-sales signal is a judgement each desk will make for itself, but the firm does not pretend the gap is not there.
“It tracks pretty closely if automotive sales are the bulk of a company’s revenue,” says Sheehy. “For dealership groups, for example, vehicle inventory, turn rates, pricing, and days-on-market are directly relevant to the operating story. For OEMs, the read can be powerful, but it has to be interpreted alongside other parts of the business, like captive finance, leasing, parts, service, international exposure, and non-vehicle revenue. To the extent that North American auto sales are a big part of revenue, we can track pretty closely; to the extent they’re not, our data can still be a valuable complement. What we provide is a daily, retail-level view of a very important part of the model, which can help investors understand whether the reported numbers are likely to improve, weaken, or surprise.”
For dealership groups whose earnings come mostly from the retail activity the data tracks, that is a close fit. For a major vehicle manufacturer with a large finance arm and substantial sales outside North America, it is one input among many.
A Defensible Moat
If the raw material is public advertising, scrapeable in principle by anyone, the question is where the defensibility lies. McKay locates it in time, coverage and the work done on top of the data rather than in the data itself.
“Our moat starts with history,” he says. “We’ve collected vehicle data since 2012 and have had full U.S. retail coverage since 2017. You can’t recreate that history after the fact. Today, we capture nearly all publicly listed retail vehicles in the U.S. and Canada, update inventory daily, and identify sales within seven days. The data is available at the individual VIN level or in aggregate, with quality controls built to operate at scale. It’s used throughout the automotive value chain, especially by dealers and the technology providers that support them. That combination of history, coverage, speed, detail, and real-world use is very difficult to replicate.”
MarketCheck’s data is validated in live commercial use: a large share of the company’s business is selling the same data back into the retail motor trade, where errors are caught and corrected in the ordinary course of business. And because the source is public advertising rather than dealer or state records held under agreement, MarketCheck can release data at the individual VIN level, where the registration and dealer-management incumbents are contractually constrained from doing so. That granularity, delivered increasingly by API, is what has drawn a newer wave of buyers building automated tools on top of the feed.
Beyond the Dealership
The company’s investment-funds practice is still young, established in earnest only over the past year, but growing.
“We’re expanding beyond our traditional automotive customers and working more deeply with investment managers, insurers, auto finance companies, and technology firms,” says McKay. “They’re using the same retail-market data that dealers and automotive platforms have relied on for years, but for different decisions and products. Our job is to give each market the coverage, history, detail, and delivery methods it needs. That opens significant new opportunities for us without taking the business away from what we do best.”
Ultimately, MarketCheck’s value lies as much in its candour as its coverage. By explicitly acknowledging its blind spots (such as direct-sales new EV inventory, wholesale transactions, and local offline sellers), the firm builds trust with analysts and institutional investors navigating a complex market. Coupled with an unique historical dataset dating back to 2012 and granular, VIN-level tracking, MarketCheck provides a critical real-time pulse on the automotive sector. As the company continues to expand its reach into investment funds, insurance, and auto finance, its transparent and empirically validated approach positions it as a strong mechanism for those needing to understand the retail market’s direction before the next quarterly earnings report.
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