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Clint,

If I recall correctly, you're still getting your feet wet so I can understand any confusion around this.

TrueCar get's a lot of TRANSACTIONAL data from participating dealers allowing them to access their DMS. This was a HOT subject a few years back. TrueCar had an advantage due to Zags (sister service) sizable footprint. Zag charges for the Lead to Sale rather by price per lead. Dealers LOVE that. Only pay when you sell a car. BUT in order to match leads to a sale, Zag needs access to your dealers DMS. While they're in there, they go ahead and grab the transactional data associated with all the deals. From there, they can get a good idea (most times) of what the dealer sold the car for. Enough dealers, enough sales within a region and you have some data to work with in order to determine the averages.

This article on the blog provides some more details, while it also caused quite a ruckus.

I hope this answered your original question.