Not correct, you can sell cars with out of state registration, but in some cases you need to return the vehicle to its registered state to renew it. If a QLD resident bought it they would have 3 months to change it over to QLD rego.
However it’s very likely another traveller would buy it, who may be on their way back down to Sydney anyway.
Best rego for travellers to buy is a vehicle which is Western Australia rego, no inspections are needed and rego can be rewewed online (no need to take the vehicle back to WA). Thats why must trucks and rental cars are WA registered. You’ll find lots of cars with WA rego for sale in Sydney on Gumtree or at the backpackers car market places in Kings Cross.
Nope, bad plan. Rent. I’m really just repeating what others have said and I’m not against this sort of thing, generally. I’ve done similar things.
But the economics/risk don’t work out for you here. Your figure of $1200 for a rental is what I would have estimated. Against that, the odds are very high that you are going to lose on the changeover, and frankly everything is against you. You will be under pressure to buy quickly, and you will be under pressure to sell quickly. I think it would be a miracle if you kept your changeover loss down to $500.
You’re planning on buying in NSW and selling in Qld. This is going to mark down the value of your car because a Qld person won’t want an NSW registered car and this will affect value. It will increase the cost of selling because you will need a Qld roadworthy certificate which will cost you $100 plus (assuming the car passes without needing any work at all, which is rare except for reasonably new cars). Or you can sell unregistered, but that will eviscerate the value.
My take on it is that you will be lucky to lose less than $1200 on the whole deal, and if you lose less than that it will be by too little of a margin to account for the ease and time saved and minimisation of risk involved in getting a rental. And the only way to pull the thing off with a loss much less than $1200 will be by you saving money by spending days and days on buying and selling, which wastes your time on holiday.
If you said six months, or maybe three then OK, but not one month. It doesn’t work out.
Forget the bus unless you have no other option financially. You won’t see much by bus because too much is off the bus routes except in cities. You need a car unless you are really only planning on visiting cities.
Reading coremelt’s posts, the economics may be distinctly better if there is a ready market amongst backpackers for travelling cars on the Sydney/Cairns route which will avoid rego hassles. However, overall I still very much doubt it’s worthwhile for such a short period.
btw, check out Wicked Campers and the other backpacker camper hire companies if you are going to go that way. you can get a camper van for same price as you’ve been quoted for a car hire.
in case you’re wondering, I do visual installations at festivals as one of my jobs… so have been up and down east coast for events many times and gone through all kinds of rental and buy options for sleep in vans…
Another Aussie here, as others have said buying and selling is going to be too much of a hassle with time, rego, etc. Plus you’ve essentially got zero chance of buying a reliable car for $1,000. And really, given the distance is about 2,600km (or 1,650 miles), I don’t think it’s worth the risk.
The Wicked Campers idea is brilliant, they’re exactly the sort of rental company you need especially for a self-drive and surfing holiday. The vans are a mix of old and new they’re well-maintained and the company has a good reputation for value for money. I’ve seen them all over the place up and down the coast of Australia.
Wicked campers has copped a bake in the press recently for safety issues, but they are popular. They also deny any wrong-doing in all of this.
Another issue for selling a NSW car in QLD is that the registration for 6 months in Queensland is about $360 for a 4 cylinder car. That includes third party insurance as mentioned above. While a new purchaser of your car could cash in the remaining value left on the NSW rego, there might not be much of that. For a prospective purchaser to buy a car worth $1000 only to have to pay another $360 to register it in Queensland is a pretty dodgy option. That’s part of why it will be a tough job selling it at the end.
I concur with the others above - $1000 is too low for a car to be reliable - you are gambling your whole holiday on its reliability. Repairs and parts aren’t cheap - even a modest repair is not going to start below $200-$300. And you will probably want a car with air con that’s reliable in North Queensland.
I’d go for the renter. Guaranteed loss, but significant support from the rental company, and no time lost in the buying and selling part. Buying and selling a car here is not like buying and selling a surfboard. Buying gives you no guaranteed gain (you might or might not lose time and money on repairs, you might or might not be able to sell it at the end to recoup some losses) and the sums aren’t looking too good when you do the comparison.
Even if you get a car for $10,000, there is no guarantee you will be able to sell it at the end at all, let alone for $9,000. Cars lose much value in an unpredictable way.
If you want to buy a car quickly you will have to do it through a dealer rather than a private sale, but here is a well-used site that will give you an idea of what you might get for your money here.
Also: if you are selling a car you will need a road worthy certificate so the registration can be transferred to the new owner. If you buy a clunker you might need to spend thousands getting it roadworthy depending on how strict the inspection is. Don’t count on it being road worthy when you buy it, I’ve known plenty of guys who would get a mate mechanic to sign off on an unroadworthy car.
You’re frigging insane. The place is the size of mainland USA, $1,000 will buy you a heap of shit- on which you’ll need insurance and rego anyway, and is likely to break down somewhere.
The only people who buy cars for $1000 are those intending to do an armed robbery.
If the OP really does have that kind of money lying around, he’s insane to sink it all into this scheme just to save $500. Talk about being penny wise and Australian dollar foolish.
However, it sounds like he likes the wheeler-dealer/adventure aspect of this, so maybe it’s more about the entertainment value of the whole thing.
Perhaps he can start a traveler car broker service and take up surfing full-time.
Not true, depends on original state of rego, WA, Tas, SA rego no certificate needed for sale. Look I’ve bought and sold cars before in one month and lost less than$500. If you want to be safe yes rent… If you want an adventure, buy a car.
But if you read coremelt’s posts, he’s saying there is a ready market of “backpacker’s trail” cars being bought and sold in Sydney and Cairns with WA rego precisely because that happens to be convenient for backpackers. If that is true, then that is one issue which might be less of a hassle. I still think that for a month it’s better to rent, though.
The problem with this is that the new buyer is required to register it themselves. Registration is legally required by the new owner. It means essentially nothing that the previous owner had the car registered in another state. If the car was registered in WA, and you buy it in Sydney, you will not be able to register it in WA. (Which for those unfamiliar with the geography is on the opposite side of the continent - a NY to LA distance.) Registration is required to take on legal responsibility for the car. This might be the source of some of the argument. This legal responsibility is new, and only took hold in 2006. Since then registration laws have changed. The WA licensing department will not register a car that is not garaged in WA. PDF of identity form for licensing a car in WA. This is pretty common for all states. Whilst there may have been an active market for WA registered cars, these new rules on legal responsibility for a car mean that you can only register a car in the state where you live.
Yes they require that the car is “garaged in WA” but there is zero enforcement. WA rego renewal is online with no check that the car is actually in WA and no inspection. Absolutely you can renew a car’s WA rego without taking it back to WA. Many friends of mine have WA regoed cars. Just look on Gumtree and you’ll see there is many car’s being sold with out of state rego in Sydney, transferral to your name is easy.
I’m sure this is not actually legal but the WA government turns a blind eye to it as they make money by having cars in other states with their registration.
If you are a resident of AU you are legally required to transfer the rego into your home state within 3 months of buying a vehicle, but for a backpacker with no fixed address that doesn’t apply.
Yeah, ultimately I suspect this is the issue. It isn’t actually legal. This where things can turn really nasty. If the registration isn’t legal, and you have an accident, and someone is badly injured, your third party insurance isn’t going to be valid. Indeed you may find yourself in a level of legal grief that will defy comprehension.
An insurance company finding themselves on the sharp end of a large compensation and injury claim is not going to miss the fact that the car was owned by a tourist who never set foot in the registering state.
Note - renewal of registration is online and easy. But a new purchaser cannot register online. That isn’t renewal - that is a new registration. So you may have friends that have WA registered cars, and keep them registered (illegally). But if they sell them outside of WA, the purchaser cannot keep the WA registration. Same is true of those out of state registered cars listed for sale. They may currently be WA registered, but the moment they are sold they will no longer be able to keep that registration.
Also not true in practice, you can buy a WA car and transfer it into your name in Sydney. Again I know people that have done this within last 12 months.
Legally? Or are we talking some level of fraud here?
I can believe that there may be some procedural loophole that allows this to slip past the checks, but I very much doubt it is legal. (Using an agent to submit the paperwork and supplying a fake address in WA perhaps.) As I mentioned above, it is hardly risk free either. Third party insurance is going to be very sticky. In general those states that provide government owned 3rd party insurance (which includes WA and SA) greatly dislike finding that they are insuring cars in other much more expensive to insure states. 3rd party insurance is about double the cost in NSW as WA.
The new doctrine of legal responsibility will make the police pretty unhappy too. They want to be able to find the owner, and expect to find him at the registered address. This sort of thing could unravel badly.
I rather doubt we are helping the OP by discussing how he can commit fraud to save $500. He might as well just steal a car. Saves a lot of paperwork. Probably close to the edge of acceptable use of the forum too.
There is no fraud in the OP case, since he is under the 3 month limit for transferring rego, anyone that keeps an out of state car for more than that may be in trouble.
Yes, this is quite a substantial market for “backpacker cars,” and quite a few companies making profit from it. I recently looked at one with a “guaranteed buyback.” After looking through the details, they guaranteed to buyback at 50% of the value after 3 months, 40% after 6…
When looking through their list of cars (in the $3000-$4000) I find it hard to believe that just 3 months earlier they were worth $6000-$8000, and that 6 months ago they were worth $12,000-$16,000! Quite the interesting scam they have going there.
I had also forgotten about that loophole where you usually get a month or so before you have to start registering things.
Overall that data very clearly shows that buying for less than a month isn’t worth the trouble.
I just wish coremelt and Erdosain hadn’t mentioned the adventure aspect of it. Reminds me of my failed attempt to buy a camel in Pushkar.