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Vehicle uptake slower than expected going into the summer

By / 12 years ago / Features / No Comments

Euro 2012 and the upcoming Olympic Games have certainly created an additional distraction to the car buyer. Usually sales rates and values would have fallen off a cliff by now. This isn’t the case, but why not?

We are still seeing that a car in Ready to Retail condition is making far more money than an example needing preparation work such as bumper scuffs, wheel refurbishments or lacking a complete service history. The value drop is far more than the work itself would cost. This has more impact on the prestige market, but anything in need of work will suffer. If you’re selling at auction, make sure your cars are well prepared to see their full potential. The trade are now looking for cars that are low risk and offer a quick turnaround. The ex-daily rental and Motability cars are still a safe bet and do well at auction. 

Most manufacturers are starting to see the results of having a well-advertised and approved used car scheme. Equally as important is a straight forward way to supply dealers with ex manufacturer cars. BMW have been very strong on this for many years, dealers are more than happy to sell BMW management cars unseen to customers. This is reliant on trust between the manufacturer and dealer, but most importantly on the approved used scheme building enough trust for a customer to buy a used vehicle unseen. This way of doing business is becoming more and more popular. The customer can pick and choose between vehicles available with the dealer. The dealer has complete confidence in the car that they’re selling rather than buying at auction. The biggest winner is the manufacturer. They benefit by keeping potentially large numbers of cars away from the transparent auction halls, whilst churning great quality used vehicles into their network.

Due to the usual summer downturn not hitting as hard this year, we have dropped prices by around 1% for July. There are some exceptions such as 8 to 10 year old petrol 3 Series coupe and convertible, Jaguar XK8 and A4 Cabriolet which are starting to dip due to ever increasing running costs. As such we have dropped them by 4%.

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