LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. -

Black Book reported on Tuesday that all 22 vehicle segments its analysts watch for weekly wholesale price updates moved higher.

In a follow-up message to Auto Remarketing on Wednesday, Black Book said that across-the-board climb has happened only seven times since the company began to track the week-over-week changes in 2009.

And in perhaps a not-so-surprising fact, Black Book indicated all seven of those instances have surfaced since the pandemic began.

Black Book vice president of vehicle valuations Laura Wehunt and senior vice president of data science Alex Yurchenko combed through that 12 years of data and found that all 22 vehicle segments moved higher during the weeks ending:

March 5
Feb. 26
Aug. 14, 2020
Aug. 7, 2020
July 31, 2020
July 17, 2020
July 10, 2020

“Since the COVID-19 pandemic started a year ago, we have seen extreme volatility in the used automotive market, starting during the summer of 2020 and picking back up again at the beginning of 2021,” Wehunt and Yurchenko said in a message to Auto Remarketing. “We are experiencing a shortage of used inventory and supply chain disruptions that have caused tightness in new vehicle supply.

“On top of that, we are experiencing elevated demand for used vehicles as a result of the limited new inventory pushing buyers to used, and due to the shortage of used vehicles that has been caused by reduced rental returns due to cutbacks in ordering last year, lack of repossessions, and lease and trade-in vehicles being kept by dealers and not being taken in the same volume sold at wholesale auctions. All of these forces led to increased prices across all segments,” they continued.

Wehunt and Yurchenko acknowledged that the wholesale world is in the midst of the spring market, which typically results in prices pushing higher. But again, pandemic-triggered factors are in play this season.

“It is not uncommon for values in some segments to see increases in the spring, particularly the mainstream segments that traditionally are attractive to price-sensitive buyers that are looking to spend their tax return as a down payment on a used vehicle,” Wehunt and Yurchenko said.

“What’s notable is that even the segments that typically decline during economic downturns (e.g. luxury cars), had increased values in 2020 and 2021 due to the K-shaped economic recession,” they went on to say.