Well, all the docs agree my vision isn’t going to get better and may get worse. My vision is well below the legal minimum for driving. I have retinal damage due to a medication I took some years back. I also have peripheral vision loss and glaucoma. I’ve had more than a dozen eye surgeries. Now the docs say there’s nothing more to be done.
So it’s time to bite the bullet and sell my beloved car. It’s surprisingly hard to face, but I know it’s not doing the car any good to sit there, and it’s silly to keep paying insurance on a car I can’t drive. I’ve always traded in my cars, though, so I don’t know how to go about selling it. I live in a smallish gated apartment complex, so few people would see it if I stuck a For Sale sign in the window. Is Craig’s List my best bet? eBay? Would it be realistic to list it at Blue Book value and then not dicker? I suck at dickering.
I hate the whole prospect. Why can’t I just sleep with my car under my pillow and wake up to a cashier’s check in the morning?
Any and all advice, tips, and info would be greatly appreciated.
You may be able to find a smaller car lot that will put it out on consignment for you. I ran out of patients for craigslist, to many people with lowball offers.
It sounds like CarMax might be right for you. You’ll get more money selling it on Craigslist (eBay isn’t a great idea anymore unless it’s a rare car), but for a hassle free experience you can just drive up to CarMax and walk out with a check.
If there’s not a CarMax near you, there may be other similar dealerships that offer no haggle purchasing. For that matter, any dealership will buy your car from you even if you don’t buy a car from them, but mostly they’ll lowball you and make you haggle up.
If you’re expecting to get $9K or less then I’d go the Craigslist route. You’ll get more for it, there will be more buyers, and people looking for a car in that price range usually have the cash ready and available.
If the car is worth more than that I would go the CarMax route. You don’t want to mess around with private buyers who are trying to arrange financing on their own, getting really particular about the purchase, etc. etc.
The Kelly Blue Book value is just shy of $5000. I’d rather go the CarMax route and wouldn’t mind if it’s a few hundred dollars less, but since I’ll be earmarking the money for my transportation needs (Uber, disability shuttle), I don’t want to get TOO much less than that. Is there generally a pretty big gap between what CarMax offers and what a private sale would get?
The major advantage of CarMax is they handle everything for you. Selling it yourself on wherever might get you 10-15% more, but you also have the hassle of doing all the work yourself. To me, that’s a fair trade-off.
If you go to Edmunds.com and use their vehicle appraiser in the used car section you can get a pretty good idea of what the car will fetch as a trade-in, private sale, or dealer sale. Carmax impressed me and gave me more than what Edmunds valued the car at.
I tried selling a car myself and also got a quote from CarMax. Getting the quote took about an hour and was very easy, no pressure. They do have some standards so they don’t take just any clunker.
I advertised on Auto Trader and Craigslist. I had inquiries from one or maybe two serious private buyers, two people who low-balled me (pretty sure they were brokers), and four scam attempts. I sold about four cars before the Internet came along but now I think I’ll just take the hit and go to CarMax. It’s the closest thing to going to sleep with the car under your pillow and waking up to a cashier’s check in the morning
The best thing to do is just go to CarMax and get a quote.
There is going to be a decent gap between a private sale price and CarMax’s price. CarMax has to cover the cost of their operations and make a profit, and that price gap is mostly where it comes from.
On the other hand, you don’t have to deal with the craigslist riff-raff. How valuable is your time, and how frustrated will you get having people not show up after you’ve set a time for them to see it, or ignoring emails that offer you $850 TODAY or want to see if you’ll trade for a pound of weed and part of a leftover turkey sandwich? (I’m only joking a little)
FWIW, I sell all my cars on craigslist. The extra hundreds of dollars are easily worth a few dozen emails that I can ignore, and I simply never schedule anyone to come see it except when I’m already going to be home doing other stuff, so it doesn’t really matter when they flake out.
Craigslist is fine. Pick your price and put “Price is FIRM” right in the ad. Any email or phone call you take, repeat that line, “Price is FIRM”. If someone wants to come look at it, tell them not to waste their time if they intend to offer less.
It works. You’ll eventually get a serious buyer and they will come and give you money.
By the way, what kind of car is it? I’m always looking…
Sounds like a starter car for a kid in HS or going off to college. If it’s a decent car, it should sell pretty readily. If you’re employed, you might post something on the company bulletin board.
For me the difference between the Carmax offer and what I sold it for on Craigslist was 375%, so not trivial at all. If it was a newer car then it might have been much closer. If it is an older car, then the Carmax offer will probably not be good, because they’re betting on how much they can sell the car at auction. One thing with my car was that the Edmunds, KBB, and NADA prices were all over the place. Asking prices on Autotrader and such were also all over the place, too, but generally much higher than I felt the car was worth.
I put it up on Facebook and Craigslist. I didn’t get any scam offers until months after the ads came down. I chatted with several people by text and Facebook messenger, but the first person who came to see the car offered me 85% of my asking price, so I sold it right then. He probably left wondering if he could have gotten it for less. Keep wondering.
To put numbers and facts on it:
2002 Volkswagen GTI 1.8t, 125,000 miles. Carmax offered $800, I listed it for $3500, and sold it for $3000 cash. This was in August, 2018. In all, it really couldn’t have been much easier.
That is a stunning difference, much different than my experience.
I will add that CarMax will give you a quote at no cost, so I would recommend it even you decide to sell it yourself.
I got a quote for a 2008 Toyota Solara convertible and the quote was $11,000, which was lower than retail bluebook but higher than wholesale. I advertised it for $12,000 on Craigslist and AutoTrader and didn’t get an offer. I didn’t even get anyone to come out to look at it. I would have done the CarMax deal but just decided to keep it.
If you look at CarMax’s website, they don’t sell any cars in the $3-4k price range. The bottom of their price range appears to be about twice that. Which means that if they’re buying your car that sells less than $7k, they’re not actually going to sell it through their service, they’re just going to wholesale it to someone else, and the wholesale price of a car that inexpensive is just pretty low. They often take a lot of work to get to a retail-salable condition.
It makes sense that Carmax costs & profit margin would tend to be a fixed amount per car rather than a percentage of the car’s value. So in percentage terms, other things being equal, they are likely to be a better option for a more expensive car. And the more expensive the car, the less attractive it is to be dealing with large amounts of cash with a private buyer.
Also, they tend to not want to resell anything more than ten years old, so if your car is older than that, they might only offer a token amount and sell it in a lot to somebody who scraps them for parts, (or ships them to Mexico).
I sold my car buy buying some sausage biscuits, putting them in a foam cooler (keeps suff hot, too), taking a piece of dayglo orange cardboard, writing “Car 4 Sale”, parking it my my credit union’s parking lot, & offering a frre sausage biscuit to anybody who olooked at the car.
Sold in 2 hours, for a shade more than I hoped for.
I bet that CarMax also has figured out that someone selling them a gently used car in the $10-20k range is much more likely to buy another car from CarMax, which means they’re going to make some of it up on the car they sell you. Sure, anyone can sell them a car and isn’t obligated to buy one from them, but I bet most people don’t.
And CarMax makes very good margins for the used car business. You are definitely paying for the smooth process and not having to haggle.