Vintage Fender Price Estimator

We train a gradient-boosted model (XGBoost, quantile regression) on 14,396 verified sales collected from Reverb, dealers, and auction houses between 2015 and 2026. The model predicts the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile of sale price from dozens of signals extracted from each listing.

On held-out sales the median estimate lands within 23.8% of the true price on average, and the typical range is calibrated — roughly half of real sales fall inside it, by construction. Estimates for rare combinations lean on the model rather than direct comparables; the comp count shown under each estimate tells you which regime you're in.

This isn't one model — it's five. Testing showed that a single model pooling all 8 vintage Fender models together was measurably less accurate than giving each a dedicated model where the data supports it: Stratocaster and Telecaster are each modeled on their own, Jazzmaster and Jaguar share a model (“Offsets”), Mustang, Duo-Sonic, and Musicmaster share one (“Students”), and Coronado stands alone. Which model backs your estimate depends on which guitar you selected above.

Celebrity provenance is a multiplier, not an exclusion: guitars with documented prior ownership by a notable player used to be dropped from training entirely on the theory that they'd distort the price curve, but most provenance claims are minor and barely move price — only a handful of true superstar cases (a Beatle, a headline blues or rock guitarist) sell for many times the going rate. Excluding all of them wasted otherwise-good comps to guard against a few outliers; the toggle above applies the average effect instead.

Below: SHAP values for the Stratocaster model specifically — how much each feature moves the price prediction, per listing, across every Stratocaster sale in the dataset. Manufacture year dominates by a wide margin, followed by refinishing, condition, and market timing.

Sale prices are verified transaction data, not asking prices. Grid predictions are evaluated at a reference configuration; secondary adjustments are applied client-side. Nothing you type here is stored.