Trading down for a vehicle
- Thread starter BigBake
- Start date
Depends what KBB price he's talking about. If he's talking about the wholesale price, then I expect them to pay at least that amount. Although I have found over my years that dealers have some "special" KBB or, they just make up their own numbers, because every dealer I've ever tried to deal trade in with always claimed their KBB numbers to be a lot lower than what I find.
If it were me, I'd just outright try to sell the car. You are going to get a lot more for it. Every car dealership, no matter how "honest" they claim to be, is going to be much like Pawn Stars, they are trying to make as much money as they can, plus, they have to make money. You can't just look at it as straight price. Once they take that car on the lot, it starts costing them money, they have to have a decent margin on it.
I have found if you go in and act like you are trying to purchase a car and negotiate your price that it is better to get the price first then tell them you want to trade in a vehicle. This way you get your best price on the different car without the dealing factoring in what the make on the trade in. If the dealer won't give you a fair price at that point for your trade in sell it yourself.
I'd stick with a dealer trade-in then. You're going to save quite a bit from not having to pay the use tax that it will probably make up for the savings you get from Craigslist.
$2000 less on a straight sale, or $2000 less on a trade?
My experience with Carmax has been the opposite. When my wife and I were selling our Honda Accord, Carmax offered us $1000 more than the local Honda dealers were offering on a straight sale, and the local Honda dealers were mailing out letters at the time claiming that they needed used Accords and were willing to pay top dollar. I guess they really didn't need used Accords that badly...
That was on trades. I've never needed to do a straight sale before, so they must be better at those.