How To Sell Your Car
What is the best way to sell your car and how do you make the most money buying and selling a car privately?
I’m gonna show you step-by-step, how to sell your car privately in the easiest, safest possible way that will also get you the most amount of money.
I’ll also show you how to make the most amount of money when selling or trading a car into a dealership, and also go over the pros and cons of buying and selling privately.
So let’s start things off with how to sell a car privately.
How to Successfully Sell Your Car Privately
Now, before getting into this, it’s really important to understand all the potential hassle, risk and time investment that’s involved in successfully selling a car yourself.
It is not an easy or straightforward process.
You need to be prepared to deal with a lot of people that may be interested in your car, potentially dozens of people. How To Sell Your Car
And remember, only one person in the end is actually going to be buying your car.
Now, if you’re prepared to give it a try, there are a few important things you can do in order to sell your car for a fair price successfully.
Step 1: Advertise Your Car Effectively
The first thing that you need to do is you need to advertise your car on all the major online marketplaces.
In the US you also have Auto Tempest and a few others.
You need to create an ad for your car and take photos and write a description which will appear on all these different marketplaces.
The more exposure your car gets, the better chance you have of finding a buyer.
Step 2: Crafting a Professional, Attractive Ad
The next step in the process is actually creating a professional, attractive and detailed ad for your vehicle. How To Sell Your Car
Basically, you want to create the type of ad that you as a buyer would be attracted to and would want to see.
We’ll go over an example of an ad that I recently created for a family car that I helped sell privately myself.
Taking High-Quality Photos
First off, you need to take good pictures of your car ads without good pictures or no pictures will not attract anyone and buyers will just look elsewhere.
So take several high quality pictures of both the exterior and the interior and get help with this if necessary. How To Sell Your Car
And also make sure that your car looks as clean and presentable as possible.
In the pictures, pictures of a dirty car or car that’s filled with garbage, just give off the impression of an owner that simply doesn’t care.
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Now this may sound obvious, but make sure you list the make the model, the year, and the mileage of your car.
You should also mention the transmission type, whether it’s automatic or manual, and also whether it’s two-wheel or 4 Wheel drive.How To Sell Your Car
And of course you need to show your asking price. All of this is vital information that you must include.
What to Include in Your Car Description
Now, for the description itself, describe the condition and the maintenance and service history of your car.
Give a description of what kind of shape your car is in both cosmetically and mechanically describe what kind of maintenance and service your car has received and whether it has any major services that have been recently performed.
Sharing Maintenance History and Service Records
And if you saved any service records or documentation of service history, make sure you mention it because this will alleviate a lot of guesswork for the next owner.
You should also highlight the good aspects of your car while touching on the bad.
This will make you appear honest to shoppers and increasing your approachability.
And also make sure you share whether your car has any products such as accessories and extended warranty, rust proofing, winter tires, a tow hitch, or anything else that you think is worth mentioning.
And finally, make sure that you include your contact information and be as courteous and polite as you can.How To Sell Your Car
And whatever you do, do not use any kind of condescending words like serious buyers only or any variation thereof.
You don’t wanna come across As a person that’s difficult to deal with.
Remember, an uninformative, disjointed, or impolite ad will just be ignored because it simply does not merit consideration, especially when there are likely dozens, if not hundreds of other ads out there for similar cars.
Identifying Red Flags in Emails and Messages
And I can’t stress this enough, you need to be prepared to deal with every single person that contacts you, including by email, text, and phone.
You could potentially get dozens of inquiries from different people. And yes, ultimately in the end a lot of them are just going to waste your time.
That’s simply how the process works. How To Sell Your Car
Step 3: Safeguarding Yourself Against Scammers
You also need to be extremely careful and be mindful of potential scammers.
Watch out for any suspicious looking emails or text messages that are asking you for any kind of personal information, asking you to click on links or say they’re from another country and they want you to e-transfer the money.
Chances are all these kinds of messages are just a scam and there are tons of these types of scammers out there, so you need to be extremely careful.
The good news is that if you follow these steps, you have a good chance of finding a buyer.
Finalizing the Sale Securely
If you wanna keep things as safe as possible, just meet any potential buyers in a public place, including a police station parking lot, which is a really good location.
And if you’re going to go for a test drive with anyone, make sure you check their driver’s license.How To Sell Your Car
Accepting Payments: Cash, E-Transfer, and Bank Draft
And when you’re finally ready to get the deal done and sign a bill of sale and exchange the ownership for payment, it’s important to get your payment with either cash, e-transfer, or using a bank draft or a certified check, and make sure to do it at a bank so that they can verify everything is real and not fake.
Remember, there’s tons of scams out there and you need to be extremely careful.
Selling to a Dealership
Now, if you’re not prepared to go through all of this and are turned off by the potential hassle, the scams and the time investment, I really don’t blame you, which is why you do have great alternatives.
Benefits of Trading Your Car into a Dealership
If you don’t wanna go through all the hassle of selling your car privately, the best alternatives is to sell your car directly to a dealership or if you’re buying a brand new car just to trade your car into the dealership.
If you want to sell to a dealer, which is often pretty quick and easy when compared to private sales, make sure to take advantage of online instant cash offer tools.
Most of the websites I mentioned earlier, plus a few more like Carvana, Kelley Blue Book or in Canada clutch and Canada drives have an option to sell your car to a dealer and get an instant cash offer.How To Sell Your Car
I recommend just using all of them and go with whichever one gives you the highest offer for your car.
This is also a great way to gauge how much your car is worth so that you know what a fair asking price would be if you want to sell your car privately or trade your car into the dealership.
Understanding Tax Savings and Loyalty Rebates
If you’re going to trade your car into a dealership. When buying a brand new car, in many areas, a huge benefit of trading your car in is tax savings and loyalty rebates.
When you trade your car into a dealership, the value of your car gets deducted from the price of the new car before sales tax is applied, which means that if your car is worth a lot of money, you could potentially save a lot of money in tax.
And not only that, but if you’re buying a new car but’s from the same brand of car that you already currently own, you could potentially get some kind of loyalty rebate from the manufacturer, which means additional potential savings.
So trading your car into the dealership definitely has some advantages.
And if the dealership is giving you a very similar price to the instant cash offers that you got online, then you know that you’re getting a fair price for your car.
Needless to say, selling a car is not an easy process. But what about buying a car privately?How To Sell Your Car
Surely that’s a lot more safe and straightforward. Well, not necessarily.
Pros and Cons of Buying a Car Privately
There are certain risks that are involved when you buy a car privately
Risks of Dealing with Curbside Sellers
The first major one is potentially buying a car from a curb sider.
While curb siders are illegal, unlicensed dealers that are pretending to be private sellers, they can buy and sell tons of cars without a license, which is totally illegal.
And oftentimes the cars they sell can be junk cars with rebuilt or salvage titles or cars with rolled back odometers.
So whenever you’re buying a car privately, you need to make sure that the person selling the car is the actual owner.
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And in order to do that, ask to see both the ownership of the car and the seller’s driver’s license to make sure that they match.
And if they don’t match, well, you could be potentially dealing with a curbside to report a curbside.How To Sell Your Car
Lack of Consumer Protection in Private Sales
The next major issue with buying a car privately, which is the lack of consumer protection.
Although the process of buying a car from a dealer is not always easy, it does offer certain protections which provide some peace of mind.
Dealers are required to follow certain rules and regulations and make important disclosures about a car they are selling.
And if they violate any of these rules and sell you a problematic car, you could use your consumer protection rights through your regulatory authority.
If there’s any major problem with the vehicle that you purchase privately after the sale is complete, you really don’t have any form of consumer protection, which is why you need to take all the proper precautions before you buy the car.
Advantages of Buying Privately
Now this brings us to some of the benefits of a private sale.
Easier Access to Pre-Purchase Inspections
The first benefit is the ease of getting a pre-purchase inspection.
Some dealerships may give you a hard time if you want to get a pre-purchase inspection done on any car that you’re interested in buying, where you take the car to a reputable mechanic where they can check the car over to make sure that it doesn’t have any major mechanical defects that you need to be aware of.
But when you buy a car from a private seller, it’s a lot easier to arrange this and get this done.How To Sell Your Car
And this is a step that you definitely should not skip.
A pre-purchase inspection gives you a ton of important valuable information on a car that you need to be aware of before you buy it.
Gaining Insight from the Previous Owner
The next benefit of buying privately is that you get access to information that is normally not available when you buy from a dealer.
You get to speak with the previous owner about how well they’ve taken care of the car, any recent service or repairs that have been done to the car, and you typically get to see all the documentation for all the service records and service history, which is usually not available from a dealership.
So it really is a great source of information.
Opportunities for Better Negotiation and Affordable Prices
Another benefit is being able to negotiate a better price.
Now this is obviously not a guarantee, but it is generally easier to negotiate with a private seller when compared to a dealership, and that’s certainly the case when you’re buying a very low price vehicle.
Private sales are often the best source for extremely affordably priced cars, such as cars that are priced below $5,000, which are typically a lot more difficult to buy from a dealership.
So ultimately, there are pros and cons to both options, which you need to weigh in order to decide which is the best option for you.
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