When I got the new car, I didn’t even ask the dealer about trading in the Mazda, figuring they would offer very little, assuming they would even want it. I have been using Kelly Blue Book to track the declining value of the car over the years and it said my average trade-in price would be $3,854 while the average private party sale would be $5,658. I can’t actually get either of those because for condition, you can only put in “Fair” as the lowest, but the paint is oxidized and there is some damage to the back bumper from a minor fender bender. I got $700 for the fender bender and if I throw in $500 for the paint, I get to around $4400, which is what I would like to get for the car. One reason a 12 year old car like that is ranked that high is I have only put 58,000 miles on it.
I put an ad for the car on Nextdoor, but heard nothing. Looking at a few other cars there, it seemed like I was pricing it about right knowing I would get haggled down a little. To cast a wider net I thought I would put it on Autotrader, which is only $25. Looking there, my car seems like a real deal, but I realized most of the cars on Autotrader are from dealers and also may not be selling or they wouldn’t be there anymore. All of the Mazdas in my price range had way more miles on them. Anything with as many miles as my car was generally much newer and much more expensive. I tried comparing similar cars that are more popular like the Civic and Corolla and got about the same results. So I feel good, but who knows if anything on Autotrader is actually selling?
Then I thought I should look up any car with less than 60,000 miles for less than $5,000 to see if there is anything comparable at all. This search resulted in 12 cars. It was an interesting assortment of cars:
- 2010 Chrysler PT Cruiser, $5,000
- 2001 Volkswagen Beetle, $4,999
- 2007 Dodge Caliber SXT, $4,999
- 1997 Geo Metro, $1,998
- 2007 Nissan Versa, $3,999
- 1998 Cadilla Deville, $4,995
- 2001 Chrysler 300M, $4,999
- 1991 Lincoln Town Car, $2,700*
- 1995 Nissan Maxima, $2,500*
Plus these two:
- 2011 Nissan Leaf, $4,995
- 2012 Nissan Leaf, $4,500
(The two cars marked with * are the only ones from private sellers instead of dealers). Jeb had told me in the last few years that he heard Clark Howard saying you could get a Leaf for really cheap, but a quick check at the time didn’t back that up. But these two cars are newer than anything else in the list. When I was shopping for Ford Escapes, I knew I was paying about a $4,500 premium to get a hybrid. For that difference you could buy a new non-hybrid plus the used electric Leaf! The Leaf has very little maintenance in general, but the big problem is the battery pack degrades over time and is about $5,000 to replace, so I am assuming these models have degraded batteries. Later Leaf models had better batteries too. It could be their batteries are fine. But the miles are low because you can only drive these about 40 miles on a charge.
Anyway, we will see how things go with Autotrader. Another website is cars.com where you can list for free, but if anyone buys the car, you pay $99, though cars.com handles the money, which is nice.
The ad went live today finally. I had a vehicle recall repair that I never did (power steering could go out, but I figured if it happened, I could steer well enough in a pinch), so I made an appointment to get that fixed on Friday. It is easy to enter a VIN for a car and look up if there are outstanding recall items, so I want to avoid that question. I am debating whether I should ask the dealer to also do an inspection report that I could provide to a seller to show the car is good. It would probably be $100-200 and the buyer really should do their own, but it might protect me if the buyer’s mechanic says something needs to be fixed that the dealer didn’t. Or it could turn up something that needs to be fixed, which could cost a lot too.
After hearing nothing yesterday, I got a notice from Autotrader at 8:15 this morning that someone was interested. I was worried it could be a dealer that would try to lowball me or something, but he was ready to buy the car and was going to bring cash (which makes me nervous, but it worked out). I wound up selling for $3900 which was a little low, but nice to get rid of it so quickly. I got home and had two more messages that people were interested. Early bird gets the worm. He said he would get it painted, which I think could help the resale value a lot if that is what he is going to do, but he said he was going to keep it.
I meant to have a Bill of Sale ready and wanted to take a picture of his driver’s license and insurance card before a test drive and text those to Jeb for safety, but I didn’t do any of that. Hopefully I won’t sell another car for a long time. Autotrader worked out pretty well and for $25, it is a great deal and makes me feel better than dealing with Craigslist. I should have gotten a trade-in offer from the dealer just to compare, but I don’t think they would have given me much over $2,000, plus it wasn’t cleaned up when I was at the dealer and it cleaned up really well, although the buyer still knew I had dogs.