That said, someone willing to buy the car sight unseen is almost certainly a scam. I’m talking about ppl who came to see mine or showed me their vehicle (when I was the buyer), and then we agreed on the drive-to-buyer thing after agreeing on the deal.
How about you agree to meet in the middle? Whenever I’ve sold a used car, I’ve never had them meet at my house. Usually we meet at the bank of their choosing, because they need to get cash.
Our local police department has just such a place right outside their door with cameras. You can even go inside and they have an area where people can do such transactions. You might check with yours.
Your state MV, but in most states anyone can drive a vehicle with the owner’s permission, and the OP presumably isn’t cancelling his insurance before he sells the car.
The only way I will sell a car privately is cash in hand. First person to hand me cash gets the car, and I don’t care about your life story.
Maybe I wasn’t quite clear in my description. In my state (NY), as a seller of a private vehicle, I must remove my plates after the sale and turn it in to the DMV.
“Must remove them and turn them in” is not one of those “eh, I’ll get around to it I guess” types of things, either. I know someone who removed his plates and dropped the insurance coverage after selling his car to someone directly a while back, and then just kept the plates in his garage, forgetting all about them. Maybe even thinking he’d keep them as a souvenir, like those old plates you sometimes see in vintage shops.
All was quiet for over a year. Then, the state notified him that his driver’s license was suspended for 18 months because he had had an uninsured vehicle registered to his name for 18 months. It didn’t matter that someone else had titled and registered the VIN (possibly in another state, I don’t know). He was required to to turn in his plates in order to terminate his registration, and had not, and had dropped insurance on it. He was trying to fight it but apparently the facts were the facts, and the law was the law.
Besides, I can’t let someone drive off with my plates if I weren’t actually intending to “lend” the car short term to them, expecting its return. Anything they do with the car, or my old plates, is traced to me, unless I report them as stolen. And one can’t “report them as sold” without turning them in, or maybe reporting them as lost (which would be a lie). Why not just do the normal thing and just remove and immediately turn in the plates as part of a private sale (a same or next business day visit to the DMV)?
So now imagine if someone comes to my house and buys my car. I will remove my plates. The buyer cannot drive a car without plates on it, unless he wants to risk getting pulled over by a cop. And when asked for a driver’s license, vehicle registration, and insurance documentation, showing a bill of sale will not appease the cop. Nor will showing my old registration be any good, because the regi doc won’t match the plates, because there ARE NO PLATES.
So the buyer would have to get title, go away and get plates, and come back to affix the new plates before being able to drive the car away. Depending on where he lives relative to me, that could be a big PITA. To make it a one-visit transaction for both of us, either he comes with a trailer to tow the plateless car away; I drive it to his location, and take a cab home; or we meet at a middle point, like at or near a DMV, where he can get a plate immediately after the sale, while I can get home easily by any means I choose (ride with family/friend, Uber ride, bus/subway, maybe even walk home or go to work, depending on the location).
Huh. NY is clearly much more finicky about such matters (not unreasonably) than the South.
It’s more convenient for the buyer for you to drive to him than vice versa. That should be obvious even if there is no scam. Of course, if it’s not worth the buyer’s time to travel to see the car, he’s probably not a serious buyer. If you are willing to invest the time to drive to him, it shows that you don’t have any better offers. If you show up with the car, having invested all that time, the buyer is in a much better negotiating position.
It just so happens I bought a used car private party in almost exactly this situation about ten days ago and not for the first time. The car was 45 minutes away and technically, I had no legal authority to drive it home once I purchased it. I called my insurance company and to add it to my policy and then just took the risk of driving it home with illegal plates and no registration. The seller needed the plates back to cancel the insurance and registration so I mailed them to him. He had to trust me but it all worked out for everyone in the end. For another similar car purchase, I had the seller drive the car to my house and then I gave him a ride home after we exchanged money, title, and keys.
Ha. In South Dakota I bought a car using a paper napkin as my bill of sale, with no title, and drove the car (with no plates) to the courthouse to file for a lost title ($5) and get my plates/tags.
Yes I have also done the “drive it to me and I’ll drive you home” thing, and once as a buyer, when the seller couldn’t be bothered to drive out to me but wanted to close the deal ASAP, let me pick the car up and drive it home with his plates and registration, with my new insurance card in my name, to then mail the plates back to him later.
I got pulled over by a cop on the way home for the first time in years.
Fortunately he didn’t comment on the insurance name and address not matching the registration, that’s not illegal after all.
But still. That guy trusted me to mail back the plates, but in his position I never would for a buyer i didn’t otherwise know.
Regardless of all the possible scams and actual legitimate reasons that a potential buyer makes odd requests, I’ve found that you generally get enough people that are interested that you can safely ignore all that. Eventually someone will email you and after a few back and forths you’ll come to a good agreement that doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable.
For example, the other day I sold a truck online. I made it very clear that I was selling it because it stopped running, I don’t know why it’s not running and it’s too cold for me to poke around at it. The first person with $600 and a way to haul it gets it.
Then the emails start rolling in…
“What’s your lowest price?”
“Will you take $200?”
“What’s wrong with it have you checked A, B or C, can you test X, Y and Z and let me know?”
“Can you have it towed to my house so I can take a look at it?”
Best practice, IMO, is to ignore them, not respond. The reason I say that is because if it doesn’t sell, you’ve still got potential leads. No reason to piss them off.
In the end, someone showed up with cash and a trailer. We loaded it up and he was gone. The whole thing took about 18 hours.
Of course, this works much better when you’re not in a hurry to sell whatever it is your selling.
That’s the problem. You list a car for $1000, drive it all the way out to a buyer’s house and now, tired, ready to go home and wash your hands of the whole ordeal, and on his home field, if he offers you $800, there’s a good chance you’ll take it. The trick is to go into the deal with the belief that it’s a waste of time and he’s probably not going to buy it. That way you’re already prepared to walk away from a low ball offer.
A few years ago someone pulled something kinda like that on me. I had a few hundred bakery sheet trays I was unloading for $3 each (going price on CL was $5). One guy showed up wanting 100 of them. We loaded them into his car and then he said "I was hoping I could get them for $2 each. Nope. I offered to help him unload them, but I wasn’t changing the price.
Luckily, in that case, I almost couldn’t keep up with how many people wanted them, so even if he backed out, those 100 would have been gone in a few hours anyway.
Or, turn it around on him. Tell him to pay the money for the Uber ride upfront and you’ll take it to see him but tell him you’re keeping the money regardless of whether he buys the car. If he buys it, you spend the money on the Uber. If he doesn’t, you’re at least getting paid Uber’s rate for the drive home. He might refuse because he isn’t serious or he might agree, in which case he’s putting his money where his mouth is about his good faith intentions.
True, but as long as he’s willing to lay out the money, I’d ask him to come to my house and look at it.
In reality, however, I would have just ignored the email. Even if it’s not a scam, I don’t see much reason to put too much effort into something I’m selling on CL when I know someone else will come along soon enough that isn’t going to ask me to jump through hoops.
FWIW, the procedure here is that you can sell it either ‘with roadworthy’ (registerable by the new owner) or not, in which case they have to do the work to make it roadworthy before they register it in their own name. There’s a transport department office just about 5k down the road - my plan is that I drive the buyer there with all the forms, they can give me the cash at the same time as we all file the transfer, then they drive away in it and I come home on the bus. That’s zero-risk for everybody, and I don’t have to worry about unknown people getting into accidents in a vehicle that’s still officially mine till they file the forms.
My insurance is paid till the end of the month - I actually have no idea whether they would pay up if the new owners got in a crash before they’d organised their own insurance but it wouldn’t be my headache in any case!
On the assumption that it’s the same down under, call or email your insurance company as soon as you make the sale and let them know that you no longer own the car.
If, for example, they do get into a car accident, it’s better to have it be in their car, on their insurance, or even in their car with no insurance. Calling/emailing your insurance company and having the insurance removed right away makes sure if they do get into an accident, your insurance (and your name) isn’t tied to it in any way.
That’s usually one of the very first things I do when I sell a vehicle. Make sure my insurance is no longer covering it.
I did already call them to make sure they wouldn’t renew at the end of the month … but yeah, maybe I will talk to them again when I’ve got it off my hands
In the states, it would be prorated, so even though you’ve paid through the end of the month, you’d get a refund for what isn’t used.
But I’d be more concerned about someone else with my insurance attached to their car.
If you have an agent with an email address, at least shoot an email over to them. Even if your insurance will run through the end of the month, sending the email is just one more thing to separate you from the vehicle should something happen with it.
Unless you can’t remove them. I sold an old car, with personalized plates. I couldn’t get them off as the bolts had rusted solid. Even a good, long WD-40 soak didn’t do anything. Ended up having to grind them off to keep my plate. What one should do is crack the screws/bolts every year when you get new registration/inspection/insurance to ensure you’ll be able to get them off when you sell the car x years later.
- Back then you could keep your plate but a given plate was only ever issued once. If you had a personalized plate & it was damaged. You had to pat to reregister your car with regular plates, send the old plate back & request a new vanity one (paying for it again, of course) & then once you got you new/replaced vanity plate, pay one more time to have that become the legal plate on your car. Even if that was “67 Vette” that you only drove in good weather, you couldn’t have it sit in your garage with the original plate if they were going to reissue it to you. If your plates were stolen, you were SOL, you couldn’t get that plate combo ever again, even if it wasn’t registered for, say, 10 years.
Agreed you can’t legally do that but if you can show a bill of sale that day, I doubt a cop will beat you up too much over it.
Dunno, is that a scam - I drive an unregistered car & print up a new bill of sale every (other) day? It would only work until I got pulled over once.
Who would the bill of sale be from? Since, I assume, your car was previously registered in your name, the bill of sale would probably make them suspicious.
If you mean you’d buy a car and do that, that would only work if the seller didn’t fill out a Seller Notification. In WI you have to do that. The reason they give is that if something happens with the car, you have “proof” you sold the car. Of course, if I’m going to do something with the car, like rob a bank, I’ll put that notice in a few days earlier.
The real reason appears to be so they know to expect it to get reregsitered soon (which brings in money) plus you have to write down the selling price, which in some cases means you have to claim it as income.
But if it’s just to avoid having to register a car and pay for it, it’s probably more work than it’s worth. My dad tells stories about all the hoops they’d jump through to register cargo vans as cars. They kept bench seats in the back held down with string to show it wasn’t being used to haul anything. Of course, they’d have to take the seats out to haul stuff. One day he realized they were going through a lot of trouble to save like $30 a year.