JDM market trends

Most numbers on this page are direct aggregates over the JDMBUYSELL marketplace — all active listings from dealers and private sellers, plus the last-30-day inquiry leaderboard. The one exception is the pulse chart's buyer-interest line, which is an external industry search-demand index (detailed below) and is not a JDMBUYSELL marketplace count. Marketplace figures refresh daily; the search-demand index refreshes monthly.

• The pulse chart's new-listings (supply) series is temporarily withheld from this view. The underlying listings.created_at and feed_listed_at values are inconsistent for legacy records carried over from the prior platform, so the series would misrepresent true marketplace supply across the 12-month window. The buyer-interest series is independent of this and continues to render.
• The pulse chart's buyer-interest line is a monthly Google search-demand index for a fixed basket of representative JDM-import search terms (US market, basket v1), sourced from a third-party keyword-data provider (DataForSEO, US location code 2840). It is an industry-wide measure of buyer interest — independent of JDMBUYSELL's own inventory or inquiry volume — so it is not a count of JDMBUYSELL page views, inquiries, or sales. Search-volume data is reported with a roughly two-month lag, so the most recent point plotted is the latest month with settled data (not the current calendar month). Series version: basket v1; refresh cadence: monthly.
• The "Where JDM demand comes from" section uses the same search-demand dataset at alias_version 1, across 6 English-relevant importing countries (US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany), summing the latest available month's search volume for every tracked model (~100). Raw volumes are never shown — only each country's share of the tracked total. Per-model country splits reuse the top-10 leaderboard chassis; shares below 3% of a model's own tracked-country total are folded into "Rest of tracked countries".
• Every figure in the footprint strip (active listings, dealers/sellers, makes/models, countries, median ask, typical price range) is a direct aggregate over the JDMBUYSELL marketplace computed by the market_trends_overall_stats() SECURITY DEFINER RPC and refreshed daily. Each stat has a stable anchor link (see the strip) so it can be cited directly.
• The "JDM Market Report" block regenerates from the same live data at render time — no numbers are hand-edited — and shows its as-of date (today for marketplace aggregates; the latest settled month for search-demand data, which lags ~2 months). It is a page block only for v1; no blog archive is published yet.
• Positioning claim. The public phrase "The first and largest selection of JDM cars in North America" rests on two dated, checkable pillars. First: jdmbuysell.com launched in 2009 (founder-confirmed Colin Greig (founder), 2026-07-02; earliest Wayback Machine captures of jdmbuysell.com at web.archive.org/web/2009). Competitor founding dates are only compared when independently verifiable — none are asserted without a source. Largest: asserted only against the tracked NA-facing competitor set below (currently supported), while the live active-listing count (6,323) exceeds the largest comparable capture on file. If the count stops supporting it, the qualifier steps down automatically. The tracked set and per-competitor evidence:
  • Japanese Classics (japaneseclassics.com): 287 active listings captured by JDMBUYSELL listing-import telemetry, as of 2026-06-09. evidence.
  • Duncan Imports (duncanimports.com): No comparable capture on file — No comparable capture on file — import telemetry unreliable as of the 2026-07-21 fleet-wide dark incident.
  • Right Drive Inc. (rightdrive.ca): No comparable capture on file — Listed as closed in the dealer coverage report (2026-06-09).
  • Montu Motors (montumotors.com): No comparable capture on file — No comparable capture on file (dealer excluded from import telemetry at owner request, 2026-06-04).
  • Boost Auto Imports (boostautoimports.com): No comparable capture on file — No comparable capture on file.
  Where a competitor's inventory cannot be compared (no capture, closed dealer, or an owner-requested exclusion), it is disclosed rather than guessed. This page makes no claims about marketplaces outside this tracked set.
• The demand dataset is downloadable as CSV at /api/market-trends/demand.csv — the same monthly search-demand series the pulse chart plots (period, label, indexed demand), generated from the live DB series with its source attribution embedded. The per-country price-gap comparison is downloadable as JSON at /api/market-trends/price-gap.json.
• The chart's y-axis is indexed: 100 = the highest single-month value in the 12-month window; every point is shown as a percent of that peak. The raw basket search volume is intentionally not exposed on this page.
• The "What JDM buyers are watching" leaderboard ranks chassis by a composite buyer-watch score: JDMBUYSELL inquiry volume and indexed US Google search volume for the model (DataForSEO, alias_version 1, refreshed monthly) are each normalized 0-100 relative to their own leader, then averaged 50/50. Like the chart's y-axis, this obscures the absolute inquiry/search volume per chassis. A model with no search-volume data for its curated keyword is ranked by inquiry volume alone and flagged "site activity only" in the row. The trend chip still compares the underlying recent vs prior 30-day inquiry counts only — it is not affected by the search- volume blend.
• The pulse chart's headline trend compares the average of the most recent three months against the average of the prior baseline months in the window, expressed as a percentage change in buyer interest.
• Top-10 chassis ranks active listings by count after grouping by make and model. Listings missing either a make or model are excluded.
• The "Price range (P25–P75)" column is a monthly snapshot, separate from the live median-ask column next to it: on the 1st of each month, JDMBUYSELL computes the 25th–75th percentile band of active, buyer-visible asking prices (USD) for every chassis with at least 5 comparable listings that month. Chassis below that threshold show "not enough data" rather than a misleadingly narrow or unstable range. No hard outlier exclusion is applied — the percentile boundaries themselves are resistant to a handful of placeholder or extreme-outlier prices.
• Median and average prices reflect asking prices, not transacted sale prices. Actual transaction prices may differ materially. Prices stored in USD and displayed in your preferred currency using FX rates refreshed daily at 05:00 UTC (source: ExchangeRate-API); structured data reports USD aggregates only for citation stability.
• 25-year-rule eligibility is based on the seller's stated production year; actual import eligibility for any individual vehicle depends on the build date stamped on the door-jamb compliance plate (49 CFR 591.5(i)(1)). Consult a licensed US customs broker before transacting.
• The "biggest mover" callout picks the chassis with the highest 30d-vs-prior-30d trend from the inquiry leaderboard, filtered to recent_count >= 3 so a 1→2 row doesn't outrank a 20→70 row.
• The "Where JDM demand comes from" section tracks Google search demand across 6 English-relevant importing countries: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany. Every figure is a share of tracked search volume, never an absolute count — raw search volumes are population- and search-language-confounded across countries, so only the relative split is meaningful. The overall chart sums the latest available month's search volume across every model this page tracks (currently up to ~100 by listing count); the per-model table reuses the same top-10 chassis as the "What JDM buyers are watching" leaderboard above. Per-model country shares below 3% of that model's own tracked total are folded into "Rest of tracked countries" rather than shown individually, since DataForSEO's own volume bucketing can return near-zero or misleading figures for small countries paired with niche models.
• A "cars sold" series is intentionally absent from this version. The underlying listings.sold_at column carries a recent backfill artifact (historical listings being status-flipped in batches) that would over-report transaction flow if surfaced here. The signal will return once the artifact is distinguishable from organic sales.
• Per-chassis price-change history (e.g. 30-day price change) is accumulating in a price-observation log; the surface that consumes it will appear once enough history has accumulated.
• Export-side Japan auction-hammer pricing is not integrated in this version. Public Japan auction-house data was evaluated and judged non-viable for free ingest.
• This page makes no claims about other platforms. Inventory figures for marketplaces not operated by JDMBUYSELL are not independently verified here.

Source: the JDMBUYSELL marketplace. Aggregates refresh daily.