We're excited to be bringing our kid to reed next week and just because I like to over plan, is there a good time to plan for a final good bye? It looks like the agenda on Tuesday night is free, so maybe a dinner and then just let them go. But I also don't want to take them away from whatever else it going on and new and exciting.
Trying to prove we have the best state run auction website with my second visual of the week. Thanks for everyone's input on the first one.
https://www.datawrapper.de/_/qapEp/ If you hover over a dot, it will isolate all those OEMs, show you the sale price, J.D. Power estimate and mileage.
This visual covers the 431 light-duty vehicles sold by Minnesota Department of Administration Fleet last fiscal year and compares their sale prices with the J.D. Power auction benchmark. The comparison has a limitation: I only had access to J.D. Power data for the final month of the fiscal year, while the vehicles were sold throughout the 12-month period. Because vehicles depreciate over time, applying the year-end benchmark to vehicles sold earlier in the year likely overstates how much their sale prices exceeded the benchmark. So basically, I'm tooting our horn softer...
Why did the Transit Vans go for so much? Delivery vans after COVID were in big demand. We had them and so they went for more. If I had enough data on box trucks and delivery vans, I'd like to make a visual showing how the demand affects the price of those.
Open to questions and feedback.
My first attempt at making our data into 'beauty.' Lots of room for improvement.
Ever wanted to get a good deal on a vehicle at an auction? There are definitely deals to be had, but don't expect to walk away with a vehicle at KBB's auction price. Our popular vehicles, with low mileage and less than 10 years old go for below commercial prices, but over auction prices. While we do have dealers who buy from us, we also get enough public traffic to make the prices competitive. That's good for the tax payer.
There is some noise in this data I didn't filter out. We sell 'totaled' vehicles and those have more unique buyers, depending on the condition. For example, a hail damaged car that is totaled might go for a lot more than the one damage by a brush fire. Either way, those vehicles are in this report and aren't exactly apples to apples.
Questions? Thoughts on what I can do with the data?
Source: MNBID.MN.GOV
Tools: Datawrapper and ChatGPT
I'm not much of a lawn guy, but I've been forced into action. We bought this house 3 years ago and the yard was a complete mess. We've cleaned up the gardens and kept the grass mowed, but last summer, the creeping charlie took over, burnt out and left a bunch of dead patches. This spring, my wife put down some black plastic over a big portion of the creeping charlie in an effort to kill the weeds.
I tried to stay out of it because I'm sort of all in or all out when it comes to this kind of thing and I fine with my yard being a place where my dogs do their duty and I get no joy from straight lines after a mow.
After pulling up the plastic, she put down seed, but it was only partially effective. You can see the spots with the fescue that look to have taken, but then the crab grass just blew up and has filled in where much of the creeping charlie was before. And then there is still plenty of creeping charlie.
And from what I've read in this forum, that crab grass will die off after the first frost and leave the yard with more dead patches, the thing we were fighting against with the creeping charlie. I think I understand my options to kill the crab grass, but I'm a bit unsure about killing the crab grass and creeping charlie while also promoting the clover/fescue mix. Do I need to just use a selective weed control or is my only option to kill all non-grass and then reintroduce the clover?
I'm a state of MN employee and part of my job is to manage the state's auction website, MNBID.MN.GOV and we're looking at ways to increase our page views. We're one of the few states that manages their own resale process and it's pretty awesome. We have a competitively low fee, have no buyers fee and are entirely self funded. Our site does very well for used cars. Popular models like Toyota's will get 10+ unique bidders and 20+ bids and generally beat the KBB estimate. I'd like us to be stronger in some of the other categories and that's why we're leaning into advertising. We sell all kinds of stuff and it's challenging to find the right audience as someone who'd interested in a fire truck might not be interested in 64 folding chairs.
I routinely ask our customers where they heard about us and it's almost always word of mouth, but when I ask them to spread the word, they say no as they know that could/would affect the prices.
We've tried some radio ads in the past, and that hasn't worked. I think flippers would like our site, but besides here on Reddit, and FB, I'm not sure how to reach them.
If you were in my shoes, what would you look into?