I am excited to share a product feature – Hot Car – that makes the Cars.com platform more valuable to shoppers and dealerships by identifying which vehicles are most likely to sell quickly.

The Hot Car badge uses a proprietary machine learning algorithm that considers more than 50 factors such as price, demand, and supply that contribute to how quickly a vehicle will sell. A Hot Car badge will be featured on used vehicles that have a 70 percent chance of being sold within seven days from the day it was added or modified on Cars.com. New vehicles will earn a Hot Car badge when they have a 70 percent chance of being sold within 20 days from the day it was added or modified on the site. Here is an example of how the badge appears to a Cars.com visitor:

The Hot Car badge creates a sense of urgency for consumers – which also benefits dealerships by increasing inventory views and lead conversion. Dealerships get valuable data-driven insights on which cars will move quickly so that they can turn inventory faster.

Hot Car works similar to how real estate sites such as Redfin operate. Redfin employs machine learning to identify which homes are likely to sell quickly in an area where you are looking. The Redfin Hot Homes algorithm analyzes hundreds of factors ranging from a home’s price to its neighborhood to flag homes that are more likely to go under contract with a buyer within its first two weeks on the market. In a highly competitive industry such as real estate, where acting quickly is important, the Hot Homes badge benefits both buyers and sellers.

We believe Hot Car creates a sense of urgency much the same way that disappearing Snapchat content does. When a shopper knows they are looking for a scarce product, they are more likely to act.

With Hot Car, we’re using forms of artificial intelligence to make shopping more personal and selling more effective. The new badge joins our Great Deal, Good Deal, Fair Price, and Well-Equipped badges that we launched in October 2017. Because we own a treasure trove of data, we are in a unique position to improve car shopping and selling through technology.

We’re also making one of the 4Ps of Automotive Marketing™ – product, price, place, and person – more powerful by creating more ways to match the right product with the right person at the right place and for the right price.

For more information on Hot Car, contact us.