Like most people, if you are thinking about buying a new car one of the things you will more than likely have to deal with is selling your existing car which can be a frustrating and in some cases expensive experience. Below are some useful hints and tips to help assist you in selling your car quickly.
Price This is probably one of the most important things, especially if you are spending money on trying to sell privately. What you are expecting to achieve price wise for your car and what it is actually worth can be two totally different things. Its important that you start off with a realistic selling price for your car in order to sell it quickly and not have to incur repeated advertising costs. There are plenty of car valuation websites online which usually just require you to enter your vehicle registration number and answer a few quick questions about your car before they provide you a valuation. An alternative method would be search an online car selling website such as Autotrader or eBay and see what similar cars to yours are currently selling for. A particularly good feature of eBay is that you can search for recently completed items, which will allow you to see what prices have actually been achieved when the vehicle has finally finished its listing period.
The Advert – When advertising your car you should make sure that you include as much information as possible, including key things such as the specification, service history details, MOT and RFL expiry and number of previous owners. Try to put yourself in the position of the potential buyer and think about what you would like to see without exaggerating.
Photos are the shop window to your advertisement so upload as many as possible. Try to take the images somewhere where there wont be too much distraction from your car, an empty shopping car park for example and dont just take photos of the exterior, include photos of the interior as well and any additional extras such as sat-nav that the car might have.
Viewings Make sure that prior to any arranged viewings that the car is clean inside and out. A decent valet can make a world of difference to a car and first impressions count. Also make sure that all the vehicle documentation V5 (logbook), MOTs and service history is organised and ready to be reviewed.
Selling to a dealer or a car buying company If you dont want the hassle or dont have the time to sell privately, you might want to consider using a car buying website or a visit to your local dealer. Car buying websites such as webuyanycar.com will make you an offer to buy your car immediately for cash but keep in mind that they will be buying your car to sell on for a profit to a dealer so the offer they make could be considerably lower than what you are expecting.
Another alternative to using a traditional car buying website is a site called dealerbid.co.uk. This works rather like a comparison website and will fire your vehicle details to multiple car dealers and car buying companies. Those interested in your car will contact you via the site each with their individual offers. This can work quite well as you can compare offers and play dealers off against each other to achieve the highest price.
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