Selling a car second hand is full of potential pitfalls. If you’re not careful you could end up getting a bad deal and losing money. Read on for our top tips you should follow if you want to get the maximum amount of profit when you sell your car.
TAKE GOOD CARE OF IT
The best way to get a good price for a car when you sell it is to keep it in good condition. A dirty, badly maintained car will fetch a bad price, but if you keep it in good condition you could recuperate a decent percentage of what you paid for it. Regularly take your car in to be serviced, so you don’t get any nasty surprises later down the line that could bring the sale price down. Click here for some more tips for looking after your car.
SELL PRIVATELY
The benefit of selling privately are that you get to keep all of the money you make. The downside is that you often have to put in quite a lot of work before you find someone who is willing to pay the asking price for it. However, there are a number of different ways you can advertise your car which can make the task a little easier.
Firstly, you could register your car on a second-hand sales site, such as AutoTrader. Sites like this have the benefit of getting plenty of traffic, though your car will face an uphill battle to get attention on there due to the high number of listings. Unless – of course – your car is particularly rare and desirable.
eBay is another avenue you can go down and can get you a high price if you’re lucky. The auctioning system means that if two or more buyers get locked into a bidding war, you could end up getting far more than you bargained for. However, this is far from guaranteed and is only likely to happen if your car is particularly rare.
Finally, you could go down the old-school route and put a sign in the window of the car declaring that it’s for sale. This is far less likely to be successful but, who knows, you could get lucky.
AVOID DEALERSHIPS
Whether you’re selling outright or looking for a part exchange, going to a dealer is a bad idea. Since they’re not going to take the car for themselves and will be looking to sell it for a profit, you’ll get less than you would if you sold it privately yourself. They’ll constantly be looking for faults – real or perceived – so that they can get away with bringing the price down.
It’s not impossible to get a good price when you go to a dealer, but you’ll need a silver tongue. The dealer will pull out all the stops to haggle you down, so you need to be confident that you’ll be able to hold your own in that kind of situation. For most people, selling privately is the better option.
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Photo Credit: BMW
