Last time I was selling a car, I put ads up on Craigslist and Cars.com, and generated much interest. That was four years ago.
This time all I got was scammers.
The cars are similar in terms of attractiveness. Last one was a 2005 Honda Pilot, this is a 2009 Toyota Highlander. Price is about 3/4 through the range suggested by KBB for private sale.
Is there some new avenue through which people sell cars now?
Four years is a longish time I the e-commerce world.
Carmax. It will likely be closer to trade-in price than private sale, but will only cost you an hour of your time and 0 of the hassle of selling private.
I’ve sold nearly all of my cars over the past 15 years on Craigslist, including one in 2016, without much hassle at all. I don’t accept emails, which helps. If someone is truly interested, they’ll call.
Carvana is the new hotness but I don’t know much about the process.
I recently bought a new used car and checked Craigslist at least a few times a week for months. It was only a lack of available stock on the particular car I wanted that eventually had me buying at a dealer for a little more than I wanted to pay. I wish the original owner of my car put it up on CL. I’d have bought it for (likely) more than he got from the dealer but less than I ultimately paid. In other words, there are legitimate buyers out there.
I bought my previous car on ebay. It was fine. I spoke with the seller over the phone to try to sniff out a scam. He passed that so I paypal’d a deposit of about $500 which happened to be 5% of the purchase price. I bought a one way ticket to Florida, the seller picked me up and I drove the car back home to Chicago. Ebay is less anonymous than CL so maybe fewer scammers?
Craigslist still works for me.
You’re always going to get scammers. If you’re not getting actual buyers, maybe the market is not in line with KBB’s estimate?
Time of year? The economy in general is pretty hot, which means more people buy new cars than used ones?
I think this is a very localized question. My sister just sold two cars by parking them at a specific set of traffic lights, where the locals always park cars for sale, with her phone number in the window. So, ya.
Craigslist has always worked for me. I can tell who are the scammers and just don’t reply to them.
I still use Craigslist. Scammers outnumber real replies 20:1, but I just delete any reply that smells bad. I also see cars on Facebook Marketplace.
Add me to the Craigslist … list.
Finally sold the car today Reduced the asking price twice over two months. I got better at sniffing out scammers as time went by. Actually I just ignored every single email and text in the first eight hours of posting it for the third time.
I’ve sold three cars on Craigslist, but I don’t recall ever getting any responses that I would call scammers. What do these scammer responses look like, and what are they after?
They want to buy the car sight unseen for full price (because they are out of the country, are a broker across the country, whatever) and they want to pay you by some kind of electronic method or a bank check. I assume the end game is either some kind of refund fraud (they “accidentally” overpay you, you send them a refund then find their payment was fake) or a way to get your account details so they can drain it.
The patter is almost identical. Many are word for word the same for the first three text exchanges. They sound completely normal, until you realize the person (or bot) has not read the posting.
If you post a 1975 Ford Pinto with extensive rust and a blown engine for $12,000 you will get the same responses.
Got this exact message, word for word from three different numbers, in November, December and January each time I posted the car for sale. Not a similar message. The identical, word for word, message. Including the missing spaces after the commas. This is after the identical three questions about the car itself, the answers to all of which were in the posting.
“Sounds good,I will be paying via PayPal,once I make the payment,I will have the pick up company contact you as regards the pick up schedule. Can I have your name and PayPal email address so I can get things underway. Thanks”
Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace.
Facebook doesn’t have nearly the number of scammers and bots that infect Craigslist. I’ve sold my last three vehicles through Facebook, and it was much less of a hassle than Craigslist.
Well, this didn’t age well.
I’m selling another car now and posted it on Facebook Marketplace. The first day was pretty much all scammers. The rest were maybe not scammers but not serious buyers either.
I guess the scammers have moved on from Craigslist to Facebook Marketplace in the last three years.
I sold a fairly expensive auto part on FB marketplace last year. Same thing – almost all were scammers. One seemed legit and I told him I’d be at a certain mechanic’s shop with a date and time. He showed up and we made the exchange in the garage.
I have a car to sell after Christmas and will be going through this again. Not sure whether to use Craigslist or Marketplace, but I’ve got a burner phone with no connection to my other accounts to handle calls. (I hope I wrote down its number somewhere, atm I can’t remember it. 
)
Only accept cash, and first one to bring the cash gets the vehicle. People will come up with all sorts of stories but you need to sidestep all that and say cash buys the vehicle.