A. 9:00 a.m.: take photos of car in nice morning light
B. 10:00 a.m.: post craigslist ad
C. 10:15 a.m.: deluge of e-mails and phone calls commences
D. 11:45 a.m.: buyer pays in cash and drives away in car
The only problematical step was C. Any ad on craigslist triggers a massive response, and most of them are spammy. If you’re a skeptical person, and read the craigslist warnings, you can spot the iffy ones pretty easily. Just ignore e-mails with lots of caps and exclamation points, or ones which ask you to call them or have an area code from a distant location. Once those were winnowed out, there were three serious buyers. And I mean serious: they were begging us to hold the car until they could get there. In this case, it was first come, first served. And the first guy who showed up had cash and was a motivated buyer.
But he bought a good, well-maintained Honda Civic hybrid. He needed economical wheels, we needed $4G, and everyone was happy.
I’ve sold 2 cars with craigslist and had them both sold within 12 hours.
I think if you price fair from the beginning and have a desireable car (Hondas and Toyotas in the $3-$5K price range) they pretty much sell themselves.
2004 hybrid Civic with 200,000 miles on it. It was a bit of a bargain; we would have preferred a bit more $$, but the guy had cash in hand and didn’t want to dither around. Neither did we.
Oops on the forum. I could have sworn I was in MPSIMS.
Same here - sold a '97 Honda CR-V a couple years ago on craigslist - posted mid-morning, sold by mid-afternoon. I did not realize how swiftly things would go and was not ready with the pink slip - I had to go find it while the buyer waited outside. If you post a car on craigslist, be ready!
How true. Does in have a bimi top? Is it a tri-haul? Does it come with a duel axel trailor and just need TLC?
Anyway, whenever I sell via Craig’s List, I price it fairly and write a nice, clean, easy ad to read. Simple, clear pictures takes by someone other than a drunk with a cell phone camera dating to 1999. Bullet points and keeping it simple = success.
Yeh, we keep files on our cars and keep the pink slip, all repair records and parts receipts and any warranties still in effect at time of sale. I like to find and print out ahead of time a bill of sale from the DMV website and keep it clipped to the front of the file.
Further on the guy who bought our car: he was from out of town, and had at first come to our part of the bay area to buy someone else’s car, but rejected it as too rundown. As he then sat pissed off in a bar playing with his cellphone, he saw our ad pop up and promptly contacted us. He still had the amount of cash with him that he planned to spend on the first car, and it was within a couple of hundred of what we were asking.
He didn’t know anything about hybrids, really, and had to be educated on how they differ from a conventional car. He was a tattooed hippie kind of guy from Berkeley, so I’m sure he’ll like that aspect once he gets used to it. As well as a 50 mpg car!
I’ve had absolutely no luck at all selling. I’m beginning to wonder if people understand negotiating. Of the non spam calls and emails I’ve recvd the,first words have always been. What’s the,lowest u will take? I got an idea how bout coming out and,looking at the car and then offering me a price then we can negotiate somewhere in between. Freaking rednecks want to steal my cars.
My girlfriend sold her car in no time flat on craigslist, too. Had the deal made in under 90 minutes, and the car was towed and the deal done in under 24 hours.
Yeah, we’re trying to sell our house, and apparently a lot of people think that we should give the place away. Yes, the neighborhood isn’t the best, and the house was never the best house on the block anyway. But we’ve maintained it, and we can show you the paperwork on the new roof, and the place has a lot of good features. I’m amazed at how many people want to know what the lowest we’ll go is, and then they want us to finance it, or make a rent-to-own deal, without doing a credit check.
I might just take off the engine (25 h.p. Mercury four-stroke short-shaft, maybe 20 hours on it) and sell that, then donate the boat and trailer to charity.
Maybe it varies with the state you live in, but trailers have some artificial value here in PA.
Say I build a trailer, or buy a used one not realizing I’ll need a license/title. It gets tricky quickly in PA.
I sold a boat trailer that was only good for scrap and got more than I did for the boat. The guy just needed a trailer title so he could get plates for a nice trailer he owned but didn’t have paper on.
This week on Craigslist, I’ve sold two lawn chairs and (just this afternoon) a Craftsman electric edger. The lawnchairs sold the same day and the edger took four days before it sold.
I’ve bought countless items off of Craiglist, and picked up quite a bit of free stuff.
