I was wondering if anyone has had experience in dealing with non traditional ways of selling a second hand car?
- I understand there are some car yards that charge a flat fee to advertise / hold your vehicle?
- other ways of selling to commercial buyers?
- other ideas?
If you could share any experiences that would be great - im particularly interested to understand if any of these are trusted or not to be trusted, or any other feedback.
I need to be out of the country for a little while and have a current second hand car for sale that I need to continue to advertise, or negotiate a reasonable sale price with a commercial seller. Currently the offers are pretty lowball so I dont want to have to choose this option.
There is plenty of commercial buyers having online services today. You enter all the data in some website, they give you a rough offer, you drive to some place where somebody checks your car, usually finds something to nag about and negotiates the first offer down a bit... you leave the car, get the cash. As you can imagine does that sort of business attract a lot of black sheep. I used one when relocating from Germany to Switzerland last year and that worked great - but they are not active in CH. From the ten or so I can google within seconds have I no personal experience, so I dont know which one is good...
tcs apparently also offers a selling option. some friends did that at they got a good price for the car, just paid a fee of course to TCS but it was reasonable
If you're getting low balled in the "traditional" market then you won't get excited by offers from trade buyers. Even shitboxes are making good money at the moment, are you selling something exotic?
Thanks - this is what i had in mind but little knowledge of the local operators. Selling a good car, but on the expensive side. X5 2021, petrol M Sport with many options. its a great car, once someone sees it, i think they will be happy, its in perfect condition.
Thanks, yes for sure, this was within the first few days of listing, so mainly commercial buyers being naturally active when new listings come up. This and the fraudulent queries.
Its a 18 month old X5 40i Msport, so obviously on the expensive side and less buyers perhaps. Nonetheless a great car. Ive tested my price in a few comparative markets, with BMW dealer quotes and the Comparis value and im under most of these so its positioned to sell. Im guessing the commercial guys need to buy 10-15% under market value to make their living, so their offers have been in a range around that.
I'd try to sell it to the dealer. This is a 70k+ car, sold privately and from a seller that's leaving the country - so no warranty at all for the buyer. At the same time, you are competing with BMWs with BPS. The car would need to be really attractive to justify that.
I echo the advice to go try to get some main dealers to bid on it. Dealers still can't get the stock they want of their own marques, especially more interesting stuff, so are taking the chance on buying good second hand back in for themselves to sell.
Not just a rumour, I've done this on two this year myself. One at similar price point one at a fair bit more. However don't just go to one BMW place and if they say "no" give up, you need to drive it around to a few. The one that says yes really wants it - deal done and money in your hand in less than 1 hr!
Was selling my Audi. It was very well maintained, always serviced in CH. I did the valuation basis Comparis calculation and cross checked with a Garage.
FB offers were crazy....discounting by 50%.
Autoscout was super positive. Dealers recognised that the sale price was very fair and it was very well maintained. Almost all the people matched my price.
I was keen to sell it to a private person but after the FB experience, I will only use Autoscout in the future.
I think timing may have helped too. I talked to a few dealers about the car today, one particularly mentioned 6 months ago no problem, but now inventory is apparently not such a problem.