TacticScaleWhat Copart Does & How It Makes Money (CPRT)
Updated October 2026 · reflects Copart's latest reported financials
Online auction platform for salvage, used, and end-of-life vehicles. Copart earns money by charging for the services it provides to vehicle sellers and buyers, including processing, transporting, and selling vehicles through its online auctions.
How Copart makes money
Copart earns money by charging for the services it provides to vehicle sellers and buyers, including processing, transporting, and selling vehicles through its online auctions. It also runs cash-for-cars sites, a used-parts service, and auctions for heavy equipment and powersports vehicles.
What Copart does
Copart, Inc. operates online vehicle auctions in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, Canada, the UAE, Spain, and several other countries. Its third-generation virtual bidding technology lets buyers bid on vehicles over the internet, and the company handles much of the process around each sale, including salvage estimation, transportation, inspection, title processing, loan payoff, and buy-it-now options. Copart has also expanded beyond its core auctions. It runs consumer cash-for-cars websites in several countries and Copart Recycling, which sells used parts from salvaged vehicles. Its seller tools include IntelliSeller for auction decisions and copart 360 for 360-degree vehicle images. Through Purple Wave, it also sells construction, agricultural, and fleet equipment in no-reserve online auctions, and it offers wholesale powersports remarketing. Copart was founded in 1982 and is headquartered in Dallas, Texas.
Products & services
- VB3 online auction technology
- IntelliSeller
- copart 360
- CashForCars.com
- Copart Recycling
- Purple Wave
What is Copart worth?
On an owner-earnings DCF, Copart's most-likely value is about $40 versus a recent price near $27 (46% below fair value). But TacticScale only calls a stock undervalued when the price sits below its conservative no-growth floor (~$14) with a margin of safety — so the honest verdict here is “Fairly priced — no edge.” Fair value earns its keep only at the extremes, not in the wide middle.
Price sits in the normal range — fair value isn't actionable here; it earns its keep only when price drops below the no-growth floor, or runs to roughly double the optimistic case.
Analysis, not advice. Fair value is a margin-of-safety estimate from a deterministic owner-earnings DCF, not a price target or recommendation. See the full breakdown →