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Everything you need to score at the Forza Horizon 5 Auction House
(Image: © Microsoft)
At the Forza Horizon 5 Auction House, you can turn an old banger into wads of cash.
When you’re not focused on building credits to buy more cars, the seasoned professionals amongst us know not to overlook the Auction House as a key way to maximize funds and get rid of older vehicles - or ones you’ve pumped a little money in to flip them for a sweet profit.
Forza Horizon 5 is one of the best Xbox One games, and the Auction House has been a key feature since its first appearance in Forza Horizon 3. Not only is this a great way to offload those Audi RS5s you ended up with from wheelspins, but it's also a platform from which you can earn millions of credits.
To top it all off, it's the best place to find all kinds of rare cars that you wouldn’t come across at the Autoshow.
In this guide, we’ll explain how to use it to buy and sell cars, as well as provide tips on using the Auction House for saving or making money. Whether you're playing on your next-gen console or you're using the best gaming PC, knowing the ins and outs of the Forza Horizon 5 Auction House will ensure you're always in the running to make a lucrative purchase.
While there's definitely a learning curve to be mastered, we're here to help make the whole process a breeze.
Forza Horizon 5 Auction House tips and tricks
Forza Horizon 5 Auction House: How to sell goods at auction
Navigate to the Forza Horizon 5 Auction House via the ‘buy new & used cars’ tile in your ‘cars’ menu tab. In the Auction House tile menu, you’ll see the option to create a new listing. Just select the pre-loved car you want rid of from your collection, set the opening bid and buyout prices, then select the duration you want the listing to live on the auction house for. The buyout, of course, works just like the ‘buy it now’ option on eBay - if a buyer meets that figure, the auction’s over and the item’s theirs.
Remember, once it’s listed, if someone meets even the minimum bid you can’t change your mind and take the car back. Once a car’s sold, you’ll need to collect the money from your inbox, too.
Forza Horizon 5 Auction House: How bids and buys are calculated
(Image credit: Microsoft)
Update 11 in Forza Horizon 4 changed the maths that determined how many credits a seller can set as the minimum bid and buyout price, and it looks like that system prevails in Forza Horizon 5 too.
Minimum bids are calculated as 10% of the car value, and minimum buyouts work out at 55% of the car value. Max buyout is set at 20 million credits.
However, there are a few more variables to throw into the algorithm. Firstly, cars become more valuable if they’ve been tuned or painted by high-level tuners or painters.
The Forza Horizon 5 Auction House is also self-aware - it notes how quickly a particular vehicle sold at its listed price and adjusts the value of that car dynamically. That means sought-after cars rise in value, because their demand is high.
It’s also a safeguard against player price-fixing. If a single player tried to buy all the available examples of a non-buyable car with the intention of artificially hiking up the price like some awful crossbreed of Derek Trotter and Martin Skreli, they wouldn’t be able to. No demand = no profit.
Forza Horizon 5 Auction House: When to buy
(Image credit: Microsoft)
The Autoshow is your first port of call for a reference price. Buyable vehicles generally go for less in the Auction House than at the Autoshow, because the demand for them is lessened by their availability new. You can save yourself a bit of money by looking for that car you’ve had your eye on in the used market instead of buying it new.
When it comes to non-buyable cars - that is, cars only obtained as seasonal rewards, bought with FP or won in wheelspins - the market dictates the price. You’ll find many of these non0buyables selling for the maximum 20 million credits once the seasonal event has finished and there’s no other way to get them.
For these non-buyables, your best yardstick for price is to take an aggregate from all listings. If all examples of a car are set with a buyout of 10 million credits and then you spot one with an 8 million buyout, you can be pretty sure that’s a good deal. Keep in mind that these valuable cars will plummet in value once they become available to obtain in seasonal events again.
Forza Horizon 5 Auction House: How to make money
(Image credit: Microsoft)
One method to padding your wallet in Forza Horizon 5 is flipping cars in the Auction House, either by spending hours trawling for bargains and then listing them at a higher price, or by leveling up your tuning or painter level.
By hitting level 20 in either discipline - and this comes with thousands of people having downloaded your wraps or tunes - you can unlock higher buyout prices. That means you can take a plain old buyable car, create a work of art all over it, and list it for a higher price than it would usually sell for.
Another is simply to earn non-buyable cars by completing Festival Playlist activities each season, earning FP and spending it on rare cars in the Forzathon Shop, then holding onto these vehicles until they’re not available to obtain in-game anymore. You can then sell them in the Auction House for a pretty penny.
Forza Horizon 5 Auction House: sniping
(Image credit: Microsoft)
Previously, you could find incredible bargains by using the sniping technique, which we’ll explain below.
However, for the first time in the Horizon series, you can now gift cars to other players, free of charge, using Barns. This might render sniping obsolete - at the time of writing it’s too early to tell how much player behavior will change.
Say you want that Lamborghini XXXX Forza Edition. Set the search criteria to that make and model, then reduce the buyout below the default. Now search, and look for any listings to appear. If they don’t, repeat this same search process ad infinitum until either something appears or you realize you’re a human being with needs and responsibilities other than obtaining this car, and power it down for the night.
If you do see a listing appear, lucky you. But you need to act quickly to get the car before someone else does.
Never enter the listing - in the extra seconds it takes the game to load the 3D model of the car in the next menu, someone else has probably made the buyout. Instead, buy it directly from the menu by hitting Y/Triangle to open the auction options menu, then pay the buyout.
Why does the new Barn gifting system impact this technique? Because one of the biggest suppliers of rare cars way below their usual value used to be players who simply felt charitable, had duplicates, or wanted to give away cars to newer players for fun. Now that a formalized gifting system exists, we may not see such bargains appear in the Auction House.
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Ad creative by day, wandering mystic of 90s gaming folklore by moonlight, freelance contributor Phil started writing about games during the late Byzantine Empire era. Since then he’s picked up bylines for The Guardian, Rolling Stone, IGN, USA Today, Eurogamer, PC Gamer, VG247, Edge, Gazetta Dello Sport, Computerbild, Rock Paper Shotgun, Official PlayStation Magazine, Official Xbox Magaine, CVG, Games Master, TrustedReviews, Green Man Gaming, and a few others but he doesn’t want to bore you with too many. Won a GMA once.