This summer I sold my car on Craigslist. The experience was quite different than I expected so I thought I would share it with this forum in case others are considering doing the same.
In the past when I’ve bought a new car, I’ve always sold my older car privately, but the value has never been more than $5k and the sale was relatively quick and efficient. In this case, the value was around $15k and it hadn’t occurred to me that as the value goes up, the pool of prospective buyers goes down, so the amount of time and effort to sell the car goes up. There are simply fewer buyers in the market for a $15k car than a $5k car. In this case it took about six weeks to sell the car.
Here are my tips:
1) Clean the car thoroughly inside and out. No one wants someone else’s dirt. Rub out minor scratches, use touch-up paint if needed. Wax and polish the car. Get your docs in order: registration, title, maintenance records, smog certificate (if needed).
2) Post many photos (I ended up with more than 10) and be 100% upfront about the history and condition of the car. Original owner? Accident history? Maintenance history? Smoker? Pets transported in car? Clear title? These were the things that buyers asked about.
3) Find out the blue book value and start by offering the car at the high end of the range. You can always adjust down, it’s harder to adjust up. Look at other CL ads for similar cars.
4) The first potential buyers who respond, often within minutes of posting, will be private dealers, aka middle men. They don’t make money, like commercial dealers, by reconditioning cars and reselling them with financing and warranties, they make money by badgering you to sell low, then convincing a buyer to pay a higher price. By badgering, I mean electronic badgering. They aren’t going to drive out and look at your car unless they’re reasonably sure they can buy it below market value. This is a business with very low overhead: a cell phone and an email account. They will ask for your phone number and pummel you for more information and try to bargain the price down via text/email: “I’m on my way, by the way, what’s the lowest price you’ll accept?” etc. Don’t give them your phone number, be polite, but keep track of their email addresses so you can block them. I used the CL email relay system for all communications and didn’t give my phone number to any buyers except the 3-4 I thought were serious.
5) You will get offers from commercial dealers. These are the offers I got: Carmax, $13k; Carvana: $8.7k; local dealer: $12.5k; another local dealer: $11.5k. Of course, all of these could have been modified (lowered) once they saw the car.
6) Real buyers may take days or a week to respond because they aren’t sitting on CL all day looking for new posts. Try to get them to come and look at the car – if they won’t, they probably aren’t serious buyers.
7) If you don’t get much interest, delete the ad, wait a week, lower the price, and repost. I got probably 30 unique responses to my ads and a total of one interested buyer who came to look at the car, the one who bought it.
8) Re: the actual sale transaction, I followed the CL advice to go with the buyer to their bank, wait while they get a cashier’s check, and complete the transaction in the lobby of their bank. This means the sale must take place while banks are open.
