JDM market trends

Most numbers on this page are direct aggregates over the JDMBUYSELL marketplace: all active listings from dealers and private sellers, plus listing-linked buyer inquiries over the last 30 days. The JDMBUYSELL Buyer Interest Index feeds three parts of the page, and none of it is a JDMBUYSELL count: the buyer interest chart and by-month table at the top, the interest reading behind the "What JDM buyers are watching" score, and the "Where JDM demand comes from" section. Marketplace figures refresh daily; the index refreshes monthly. Source: the JDMBUYSELL marketplace.

• JDMBUYSELL Buyer Interest Index: monthly online interest in buying JDM imports in the US, across the wider market rather than on JDMBUYSELL. Fixed base: 100 = 2024 average, so values can exceed 100. It measures interest, not buyers or sales. Each month arrives one to two months after it ends, and recent months can be revised.
• The index chart's buyer interest index tracks monthly online interest in buying JDM imports in the US, across the wider market rather than on JDMBUYSELL. It has a fixed base: 100 = 2024 average, so a month can go above 100 and a past month's value does not change when the window moves. It measures interest, not buyers or sales. Each month arrives one to two months after it ends, and recent months can be revised. Refreshed monthly.
• The finding at the top of the page compares the latest three months, and the latest twelve, with the same months a year earlier, so like months are compared. A window with a month missing on either side states no percentage. Percentages are calculated from the unrounded monthly totals, not from the index values shown, and are printed as whole percentages. They are descriptive, not a statistical test. Over the twelve months ending September 2026 the index was about 4% higher compared with the twelve months before.
• The "by month" table shows each full year of the index, one cell per month, shaded in five bands. It lists full years only and describes those years, nothing beyond them.
• The chart's y-axis shows index points (100 = 2024 average); a value of 120 means that month's buyer interest was 20% above the 2024 monthly average.

• Top 10 chassis by buyer-watch score. The score gives equal weight to two signals: buyer inquiries on JDMBUYSELL over the last 30 days, and online buyer interest in the model in its latest available month, which arrives one to two months late, so the two cover different periods. Each is scaled 0-100 against its leader. A chassis with no interest reading is ranked on inquiries alone and marked "inquiries only". The trend chip compares inquiries with the previous 30 days: ↑ rising, ↓ falling, flat within ±5%. Click a row for current listings.
• The "What JDM buyers are watching" leaderboard takes the 10 chassis with the most listing-linked buyer inquiries in the last 30 days (a curated chassis code where one is set, otherwise the generation) and ranks them by a buyer-watch score. Each chassis is scored on two signals with equal weight: buyer inquiries on JDMBUYSELL in the last 30 days, and online buyer interest in the model in its latest available month (not the last 30 days). Each signal is scaled 0-100 against its leader. A chassis with no interest reading is ranked on inquiries alone and marked "inquiries only". The trend chip compares the chassis's inquiries in the last 30 days with the 30 days before (↑ rising, ↓ falling, flat inside ±5%; "new" when there were none before). The biggest mover is the chassis with at least 3 recent inquiries and the largest rise, shown only when that rise is above 5%; a chassis marked "new" (no inquiries in the previous 30 days) has no percentage and is picked ahead of any rise. Only the scores, chips and ranks are published, never the figures behind them.

• Shares under 3% of a model's total are grouped as Rest. Generations of the same model share one split. Shares describe online interest across the wider market, not activity on JDMBUYSELL.
• Each country's share in the "Where JDM demand comes from" section is its part of online interest in JDM imports across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Germany, using the latest available month for each model and country. We show shares only, never totals, and bigger countries naturally take a bigger share. In the per-model table, countries under 3% of a model's total are grouped as Rest. The shares are built from per-model readings of online interest in buying each model, which is broader than interest in importing one.

• The listing, seller, make and model figures in Key numbers are direct counts over the JDMBUYSELL marketplace on one rule, the same one the homepage and the for-sale pages use. They count listings: the total includes partner inventory, and a car can appear more than once. Sellers are counted once each (dealers and private sellers with a listing), not by name spelling. The makes and models figure counts every make and model with a listing, Japanese or not. The countries figure counts the countries where listings are located; the homepage shows a different figure, the countries dealers are based in. The listing count is read from the same cached figure as the homepage and is dated "as of" when it was last refreshed. Each stat has a stable anchor link (see Key numbers) so it can be cited directly.
• Key numbers and the quotable sentences regenerate from the same live data at render time; no numbers are hand-edited. Each figure carries its own date: the listing and seller counts the time the counts were last refreshed, the asking prices, inquiries and the make, model and country counts the render date, and buyer interest its latest available month, which arrives one to two months late. The "Biggest movers (30d)" are the top three chassis on the leaderboard, each with its trend chip.

• The price bands list the chassis with the most listings: active listings are counted after grouping by make, model and generation, so an R32, an R33 and an R34 are separate rows. Listings missing a make, model or generation are left out of every band, and so are listings with no price; both counts are given below. Each location shows a median and a middle-half range only when it has at least 5 priced listings. When one location of a chassis has 1 to 4 priced listings, that location shows no price, and the other location shows only its median and middle-half range, without its count, lowest or highest price, so a small figure cannot be worked out from the others. When too few listings have a known location to split at all, neither location is shown.
• 1,815 of 9,435 listings are left out of every chassis band: 1,316 have no make, model or generation recorded (262 of 1,297 partner listings and 1,054 of 8,138 seller listings) and 554 have no price. Partner inventory is missing a make, model or generation more often than seller listings, so these bands do not describe every listing.
• Prices are asking prices, not transacted sale prices; unpriced listings are excluded. The footprint strip shows a median for each listing location (Japan, the United States and Canada) on its own, as do the price bands, with no median or range combined across them shown on this page. The figures are computed in US dollars; they display in your preferred currency using FX rates refreshed daily, with the US dollar figure beside them. Full definitions are on the market data methodology page.

• The US 25-year timeline lists a chassis under the year its first cars reach 25 years only when a cited source (its reference record, or a manufacturer or well-established reference page) states when production began: that year plus 25. It is a year, not a date, and a guide only. A chassis with only a sale, launch or catalogue date is listed by the year it went on sale in Japan, with no year for reaching 25 years, because cars are often built before they go on sale. NHTSA counts the age from each vehicle's own manufacture date (49 CFR 591.5(i)(1)), so what applies to an individual car depends on the date it was built, not its model year, and EPA requirements are separate. The sentence above the timeline counts listings by the model year the seller stated; it is not a count of cars that can be imported. Consult a licensed US customs broker before transacting.

• JDMBUYSELL's own listing and inquiry aggregates are licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse them with credit to JDMBUYSELL. The JDMBUYSELL Buyer Interest Index is offered for citation with attribution to JDMBUYSELL and is not relicensed. The full wording is in the data reuse terms.
• Cite the monthly edition: its permanent URL and its figures never change. The "How to cite" box above gives the citation as plain text and as BibTeX.

1. November 6, 2026 — Monthly editions, citation kit and data licence. Each month's report is now stored as a permanent edition at /market-trends/reports/<YYYY-MM>/, and its figures never change. This page gained a how-to-cite box, a data licence and this log.
2. November 3, 2026 — Buyer Interest Index revised (new base). The index now has a fixed base year: 100 is that year's monthly average, so a past month's value no longer changes when the window moves, and values can exceed 100.
3. November 3, 2026 — Seller count changed. Sellers are now counted once each, and only a seller with a listing on JDMBUYSELL counts. Partner inventory is not counted as sellers.
4. November 3, 2026 — Listing rule changed. Every listing figure now uses one rule, the same one the homepage and the for-sale pages use: a listing counts when it is active, not hidden, and either supplied by an inventory partner or posted by a seller whose account is visible.
5. November 2, 2026 — Buyer Interest Index revised (new series). The index was rebuilt on a revised series that covers JDM imports only.

• The buyer-interest series is downloadable as CSV at /api/market-trends/demand.csv — the same monthly series the top chart plots (period, label, index value on the same fixed base), generated from the live series. The per-country price-gap comparison is downloadable as JSON at /api/market-trends/price-gap.json.
• Each of these live downloads states its licence, its version (Version 2026-11-06) and its permanent source URL in its header or metadata.

• The index 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 line is independent of this and continues to render.
• Sale prices and sales counts are not published. Most sales are agreed directly between buyer and seller and the final price is rarely reported, and records carried over from the previous site do not hold reliable sale dates.
• 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 marketplaces other than JDMBUYSELL.