A few people (who may or may not have seen or played one in the flesh) might chip in dismiss the Dean Pace as being nothing more than a vertical fretless bass guitar and therefore pointless, but in my opinion that is utter ignorant BS! i used to own one and absolutely loved it. The upright position influences a different playing style and consequently your note choices and rhythms are likely to be different to playing a fretless bas guitar. If I hadn't found a good deal on a Ned Steinberger 5 string CR5M a while ago I'm sure I'd still own & use mine. The other criticism is that it is no good for bowing, but it was not designed for that, so if you're not interested with bowing, for fingerstyle its great fun and looks cool.
I played a lot of gigs with the pace. It had a punchy and growly sound which was very easy to hear in the noise of a two-guitar rock band. The materials and quality were good except for the case which looked good, but seemed to be made from expanded polysytrene covered in fabric. The stock strings were very rough & stiff flatties - hopefully they'd have been changed for something better on the S/H one you're looking at.
The electronics in mine (an early one- don't know if they were ever revised for later models) consisted of a bridge with piezos and a preamp which only had a single volume knob & no eq knobs. Not a problem if you have a decent eq in the amp or on a pedal - although if you take the access plate off you can tweak bass & treble trimpots on the PCB.
A few things which really transformed mine into a really classy sounding instrument for me were a setup including filing the slots in the rosewood nut to get the action low, a behringer ADI-21 acoustic DI/eq pedal - a bargain for £25ish which took away the piezo harshness to really sweeten the tone, & a set of Thomastic JF344 although JF345 would probably fit better.
Regarding price - I sold mine for £380 a few years ago & chucked in the TI JF344s it was wearing along with my first ADI-21 (which I had to replace when I realised how much I used it on other things.)
You can get a new Dean Pace for £440 delivered:
[url="http://www.djmmusic.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=DGB-PACE-CBK"]http://www.djmmusic.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=DGB-PACE-CBK[/url]
Mine had a natural maple finish which with its flamed facing looked a lot more classy than the solid colours.