What belongs in a structured offer
A checklist of the fields a broker should have before treating a quote as real, grouped by what each one protects against.
Most dealer quotes arrive as prose. A price, a payment, a couple of fees, and a sentence saying call me. That is enough to start a conversation and not enough to compare, defend, or hold anyone to.
A structured offer is the same information with every field named. The value is not tidiness — it is that a named field can be checked, and an unnamed one cannot.
Here is what to ask for, and what each group protects against.
Price and fees
| Field | What it protects against |
|---|---|
selling_price | The headline. Useless alone, necessary for everything else. |
msrp | Discount claims that cannot be verified without a reference point. |
doc_fee | A fee above the state cap, or a discount quietly recovered here. |
registration_fee | Small, predictable, and conspicuous when missing. |
sales_tax and tax_rate | Tax computed on the wrong base — before a trade-in credit rather than after. |
rebate_total | Rebates the client does not qualify for, netted into the price as if they did. |
out_of_pocket | The number that should equal the six components summed. When it does not, one of them is wrong. |
Trade-in
| Field | What it protects against |
|---|---|
trade_in_value | — |
trade_in_payoff | A value quoted without the payoff, which is a number the client will not receive. |
trade_in_net | Negative equity presented as a credit. Value minus payoff is the only figure that matters. |
Ask for all three, not the net alone. The net can be right while the two figures behind it are not, and the client is entitled to see how it was reached.
Financing
| Field | What it protects against |
|---|---|
apr / contract_apr | — |
buy_rate | The gap between the two is dealer compensation on the financing. Both can be legitimate and disclosed; neither is visible in a payment. |
term_months | A payment made to hit a target by extending the term. |
financed_amount | Fees financed rather than paid, which move the effective rate away from the stated one. |
down_payment | — |
monthly_payment | The number clients anchor on, and the one that reveals least. |
Amount financed, rate and term produce exactly one payment. If the quoted payment is lower than the arithmetic allows, one of the four is not what it says.
Lease
| Field | What it protects against |
|---|---|
net_cap_cost | A lease quoted from MSRP rather than from what was actually negotiated. |
residual_value and residual_pct | A residual expressed against the wrong base, which changes the lease entirely. |
money_factor_apr_equiv | A money factor that does not correspond to the APR quoted beside it. |
lease_term_months, lease_monthly_payment | — |
acquisition_fee | The same fee charged twice — once up front, once capitalised. |
disposition_fee | An end-of-term cost the client learns about at the end of the term. |
total_lease_cost | The figure that should reconcile to the components. When it does not, ask which one moved. |
Provenance
Two fields that are not about money and matter as much:
- How the offer arrived — routed to the dealer by the platform, entered manually, or parsed from an unstructured message. Parsed offers carry a confidence level, and a low-confidence parse is a prompt to check the source document rather than a reason to discard it.
- Whether it has been flagged for review. A flag is not a verdict. It says a consistency check did not reconcile and a person should look — which is a different statement from this offer is wrong, and should be presented as such.
Why this is worth insisting on
Every field above is a field a dealer already knows. Asking for it structured costs them nothing and costs you an email.
What you get back is an offer that can be checked arithmetically rather than read sympathetically — the payment against the terms, the effective rate against the stated one, the trade equity against the payoff, the doc fee against the state cap. DealHubble runs fourteen such checks on every offer it receives, and surfaces what does not reconcile rather than resolving it quietly.
And you get an answer when a client asks, six months later, why you recommended this one.
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