i don't think asking a bottomline price over the phone is that out of the ordinary, i'll tell people exactly what i want for the car over the phone. i pretty much always have a car or motorcycle for sale, not sure why REAL car people wouldn't say what they want for a car over the phone. I think most people add a couple bucks to a selling price when they list it unless it's stated as firm i'll ask what people want for a car before i drive out with a trailer and cash to see it, seems silly not too. once you see the car if it's worth what they want i pay for it and load it up, if it's not i offer them what i would pay it and leave with it or without it. i have left my number with people before and told them straight out this is what i will pay, you could probably get more for it but it's only worth this to me. sometimes they call, sometimes they don't. if i really wanted it i'd pay for it then and there.
Last street corner sale I made, car sat in my yard, sign inside stating the price. Guy pulls up in front of my house, laying on the horn as he is too lazy to get out and come to the door. How much do you want down is his question. I answered with the price in the window. this went back and forth for a few minutes. He the said that I don't understand, I want to make payments, but it's cool, I can keep it my name (!) until it's paid off. He didn't like my response that I had one job already, I don't need another chasing his dumb *** around the state looking for my car or my money. And I sure the hell wasn't going to leave a car in my name go out and be driven around. Didn't make a new friend that day either.....
Last year I was selling my SUPER CLEAN 04 Chevy crew cab. One of the first call I got on it was from a gentleman and the first thing he said was "Jello. How mush lesser will jew take for jer truck?" So I told him that it is priced under KBB and he needed to see it in person before we start haggling. This got under his skin and he proceeded to take me to car sales school. He told me exactly this "Mira mijo its a berry bad eeck-ah-nomony, and jew have to sell behicles sheeper". I didn't agree and no sale was struck.
It doesnt matter WTF you tell them over the phone. Last week a guy calls on my 32 Ford. offers me $35.K for it because he saw it at a car show. I tell him the price is $40.K. He thanks me and says he cant pay that much, I say thanks for the call. Five minutes later he wants my address which is 2 hours away and he is on his way up with his wife. They spend over 1 hour looking at it and seeing if they fit in it O.K. After taking a trip down to Louisville in their minds and saying how much they love the car, they leave and I have not heard from them since. Not even a courtesy call to say yes or no. Go figure,
Well, maybe they're having trouble pulling the last 5k for real. I have trouble pulling $500 these days.
Just went through this last weekend! I was trying to buy a '66 comet listed on C-List as running / driving car for $800. What is the catch? After trading e-mails, I keep offering my phone number to let him know that I'm serious. He finally calls me and starts out with "It is a rare out of country car" I respond with, "what the hell is that?" It was ***led at some point in South America, but he claimed that it was currently ***led in US. Ok, whatever, I made arrangements to meet him the very next day. Just before I hung up, he slips in, "oh yeh, it was hit by a tractor trailer". WTF! Ok, I'll still look at it and I have cash in hand. He calls the following morning and changes the time. Ok, I will come up after helping a friend move a garden tractor. While I'm doing that, he leaves a message that "something came up, won't be able to meet you today". I have called him three times, leaving messages. Nothing in return, now ad is removed. We expect certain things as sellers, but also remember to respect our time as buyers! Oh, well, I guess I missed out on that ultra-rare foreign Mercury that was already customized by a big rig!
There are a lot of thieves and scammers out there, especially on Craigslist, I think you just met one of them - and by constantly calling his bluff he had no where to go.... A good friend of mine (and not a kid either!) got burned for almost $3k on the old "I'm being shipped out to Afganistan tomorrow, that's why I'm selling it so cheap - just send me the money and you can pick it up from my dad" Craigslist scam..... I was in car sales for almost 30 years, and the other poster is right when he says this stuff goes on every day, all you can do is sort the cherries from the pits and carry on.
When talking price I love it when they ask if I can "do better". I raise it a thousand. Better for me, right?
A friend of mine in his sixties says when a guy says I need to talk to my wife first he says he wont be back, and usually hes right.
i sell cars every day and get used to all this bullsh-t but had i guy call me the other day to see if i would stay late to look at a car i had on the lot . would be a hour after we close i said yes . so i took the car from where it had been sitting in the tall gr*** , washed it vacuumed it checked the air in tires . checked gas . the guy got completly pissed off when he showed up said he was a mechanic and that he wanted to start it up where it was and said i was trying to pull sum sh-t on him. said when i wash the car i lost the sale . i told him to have a nice day as i closed the door on him still makes me a little mad.
Had a couple real jerks the last few weeks. Guy finds my '53 Willys Aero on eBay and offers me $1400. Someone wrecked his done car and he needs a parts car. Okay, fine, $1400 will do it, but let's do it off eBay so I don't have to eat like $125 in fees. Sunday, 6:30 PM he's sending me overnight a cahsier's check deposit and coming on Wednesday. Sunday, 6:45 PM he tells me he gets a call from the pres of the Willys club, and that guy is selling him a better car, closer to him, for less money, so sad, too bad, you're ****ed. Well, I'm translating but still - glad I didn't approve the eBay sale. Nice guy, though, took him all of 10 minutes to go from the deal I agreed to at the price he offered, to screw you... why you still even looking if we have a deal? I don't get that. So then a guy wants my number to make an offer on a '51 Ford OD trans also on the 'bay. I reply and tell him he can do that using the links in the listing. So he makes me an offer and before I approve I email and ask him to let me know how/when he plans to come get it (it comes with bell, flywheel, clutch, fork and throwout bearing, I don't want to **** around to ship all that). So later that night I come back to an email that came at about 8:45 same deal, phone number telling me to call him, and an email at 9:05 telling me to retract his bid - which he did himself about an hour later. Excuse: cannot contact seller. Outside of the fact that I'd replied to all his emails and the ******* gave me all of 20 minutes, at almost 9:00 PM, to call him back. There's only one of me, how these ***holes think I sit here 24/7 just exclusively to fill in for their favorite girl on the 1-900 chatline is beyond me. This wasn't some newbie idiot either, he was an experienced idiot with lots of recent car parts transactions. So maybe that's the new game, make an offer, waste your time, then back out with no or a ****ty explanation. But I've said it before and I'll say it again, if I have learned one thing in the last 20 years or so of selling cars and car parts, it's that there is one **** of a lot of stupid, rude, or some terrible combination of both, people out there, who pretty much don't give a **** about anything except themselves. Which, I'm not a Wal-mart greeter, no one pays me to put up with that stuff, so my limit is a lot lower than theirs. I've had people try that routine Hiway Hauler does and it doesn't work here. If your offer isn't good enough today, it's not going to be good next week, next year, or in five years. And if you have the balls to offer even less down the road, you'll be lucky if the buckshot following you off the property doesn't hit you in the ***. The trick to something like that is, if you don't have the cash I want and you don't want to be a ****, find something I want more - for instance, a halfway decent '59 Pontiac Star Chief or Bonneville 4dr hardtop would be a big time trading piece to get stuff from me, and if you don't tell me you paid $500 for it, I'll never know.
Rusty NY'r, your last paragraph is dead-on the money. I've had that ***hole (not HH, but a guy like HH) call later and offer me less. My reply to that is "stick it in your ***" and hang up on him. Had a BedRug advertised in CL a while back - it's essentially a padded and carpeted bedliner that is made for specific applications. They run four hundred new, and mine was up for just $125.00 with a pair of Dodge taillights kicked in, since I needed neither. Guy shows up a half-hour before we agreed to (I was still at work and the wife did not know what I was asking for it) and tries to lowball her on price (she refused the offer he made). I call the guy back, and he says I "misrepresented" the liner, saying it was "perfect" when it was in "very good" condition, as I was reading the ad as I was talking to him. It was still a little dirty and needed a cleaning, big deal, that's why it was $125!!! iHe hemmed and hawed, so I just hung up on him. Guy just pissed me off, and if he'd shown up with $200, I'd have shown him the gate.
Oh man, im so pissed right now. I just had a truck end on ebay, reserve was met and i was allready planning on spending the cash. Payin off some loans, grabbin another car, and gettin the kid a new powerwheels. Then 55 minutes before the auction closed the 'high bidder' retracts their bid. And i got an email stating "my 15 year old son bid on your car, because he likes American automobiles. Unfortunatly we can not afford to buy your car." It was some punk kid from Italy!! ****** Itai's! Right now im tempted to buy a plane ticket and kick the kid in the ***....
That could be true, but then I ask myself if you dont have enough to cover the full cost after learning it is a FIRM price why bother. If you do waste my time I think a courtesy phone call to explain your decision is also required. By the way I still believe a hand shake seals the deal, and I have been screwed a few times because of it.
I had an OT Chevy wagon for sale on CL 2 years ago for $300. It ran well, was inspected and in one piece. I was awed at the collective idiots that called me on it. Just one came to look at it and offered me $100 on it, a couple of others set off my ******** alarm and I then decided to take it down to the local s**** yard. Drove it onto the scale, took the plates and stickers off it and they gave me $455 cash for it. I absolutely hate selling cars and most of the time wind up parting them out instead. Bob
Yea, I'd tell you I couldn't pull that dollar amount. If you believed me or not, I'd at least let you know. I was selling a pickup truck last year and a guy called me. The truck was a decent stepside that I had gone through - brakes, etc. I only wanted $2k. I agreed to meet him early in the afternoon around HIS schedule. I went through the trouble to get off work early because he sounded serious. About an hour after his scheduled time, he decides to show up. He tells me that it's too dark out, "you don't expect me to buy a truck in the dark without checking it out in the light?" If that guy wasn't so old and desease ridden, I would have drug his *** out of his truck right there. What an ***hole - never again, my terms from now on.
I'll tell you what get me, you build a safe car and ask a decent price for it and they try to lower you on it, then turn around and buy a car 1 or 2 inches off the ground with no way to lift it and built so unsafe that you couldn't even make it out of town without something breaking, let alone drive at highway speeds.
Bought and sold a hundred with a hundred different stories. Love it when a guy offers to trade, won't get his *** off his front porch, won't send any pics and expects you to drive 6 hours to " come check it out " !! Most of the time if on a trade deal if the guy won't meet somewhere in the middle he gets a red flag, I don't mind driving but the deal has to be pretty solid.
Trying to negotiate over phone or by e-mail pisses me off. It may not be out of line, but it still pisses me off. When someone asks, I just tell them the truth: "At this moment, the asking price is the bottom dollar. If there are hundred dollar bills waving in my face, that could change."
Guy called and asked if I would sell the trans out of the truck I have for sale. I said no but I have a spare trans that works great and has a shift kit in it. I quoted him 200 and he had the nerve to ask if that was the lowest I would go. The price just doubled to him.
When selling a cl***ic car this is " what it's worth" It is worth whatever the 2 (not 3 or more third basecoaches etc) people agree to as far as a fair price.NADA kelly blue book etc are guidelines based on bone stock original cars and frankly have no bearing in the real market.In order for both parties to be happy with the transaction negotiation is usily a necessary evil.However insults ie offering half of the sellers asking price on a good solid car priced fairly to begin with is usually a good way to change the tone of the transaction.If you " need to talk to your wife " then bring her, and your money and you will be taken more serious.Also when selling a car do a little research on what you have and set your price according to what you are seeing out there for sale. price 5 cars like the one you are selling and then average your price based on comparing condition features etc.Lastly the ammount you have" invested" which is often a work of fiction on the sellers part has no bearing on the value of the car, we all wish it did but it does not.At the end of the day there is no swindle in a fair swap if both parties agree then shake on it and be done.That was the way it used to be done when a mans word still meant something and if a deal couldn't be reached they parted company with no hard feelings.
Do it all the time too! I gave up on fee-bay and cl. Im not a people person to start with. So you can imagine what happens when the half the trailer park arives to look at a bike or car im selling. With no intent on buying. I had a 60 Buick I was trying to sell a few years back. It drove fine, current tags, NEW ENGLAND car. $1000 takes it. Some ***** came over to look at it. Started to complain about the rusty rear quaters. I stoped him quick and told him to go and buy a Toyota.
Amen on this. I've been known to flat out GIVE someone a car or trade for something rather than get aggravated over a few bucks. Bob
if the car's for sale there has to be a reason. Either it's a piece of ****, or the owner wants something different, or there are bills not being paid. Firm price is only there if the seller doesn't care in selling. I know this guy who has taken his 56 pickup to every swap meet for the last 15 yrs. He sets his price just a bit higher than the truck is worth so he gets a lot of lookers, and even some decent offers. He turns them all down because he doesn't want to sell the truck, but he loves telling everybody about it, and he gets to do this more with the for sale sign in the window than if he was at a car show. Guess you could call him an ***hole seller. I always keep one thing in mind when I'm looking for a car. They have to sell it, but I sure as hell don't have to buy it. I have many to choose from, and he only has the one to sell.
I can understand his reason but not his at***ude. When I look at a relatively later model OT vehicle I prefer to see it with a cold motor, so I can see / hear how it starts... not wonder if the seller spent three minutes cranking it and another five feathering the gas pedal. But yeah, the guy was a jerk.....
when i was selling my 59 ranch, i had a guy come and look at it, and told me he'd take it. he asked if i could drive it to his house. i said ok. then once we get to his house (45 min away i might add), he tells me he doesnt really want it. and walks away. i was ready to blow my top....
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