DMV records perhaps?
DMV records for sure. A dealership can buy lists of car owners by make, model, year, and zip code.
The ones we get are from the dealer who sold the car to us. I’m guessing that would have a higher success rate than just cold-mailing from a DMV list.
It’s still a good idea to purge anyone who’s moved more than 500 miles away from the list.
Sure. But you first have to gather that information, and neither dealership I worked at considered that worth the effort. Hell, as a car salesman I didn’t consider it worth the effort. If I was cold-calling people looking to get them to trade in, it meant there were no customers around and I was sitting around doing nothing. I hate doing nothing. It was trivially easy to get the list of everybody who’d bought a car between two and five years ago and start calling or sending letters.
Letters from dealerships are definitely less weird than a guy in the truck next to me motioning to me to roll my window down, then saying “Nice truck! How much would you want for it?” out of the clear blue one evening.
Mind you, this was in about 2003-2004, and the Ford Ranger in question was 8 years old and in none too terrific of shape, so it’s not like it was tricked out, rare, or particularly well kept.
Honda Fits actually hold their value incredibly well. We paid 17K for our 2009 Fit new, and a friend just last month bought the exact same model and year for $12.5K. We regularly get calls and letters wanting to buy our car and offers of “exceptional financing” if we trade in. We expect to drive it for at least another 5yr/50K miles or so, and tell the callers this. They still come back to us every 3 months.