What the room will actually pay
Know the number.
In an auction, the winning bid isn't a claim — it's an agreement.
In an auction, the winning bid isn't a claim — it's an agreement. Someone paid it. Resale sneaker pricing has a version of that same gap, just less dramatic: an asking price is one seller's hope, and it isn't required to have any relationship to what buyers are actually willing to pay.
On shoes that trade thinly, that gap can be large — we've measured "average asking price" running two to eight times above what a shoe actually sold for last. CYKI doesn't use an average of asks as a stand-in for a real number. It prices a pair from the median of its last several actual sales in your size, and only falls back to an asking price when no recent sale exists to measure from at all.
It's a smaller number sometimes, and that's the point — a completed sale tells you what the room actually paid. A listing only tells you what someone's hoping for.
A single sale isn't immune to this either — one auction with an unusually motivated bidder is still just one data point. Weighing several recent sales together, rather than leaning on the latest one alone, is the same caution applied one level down.