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I too am sad to hear that Wheelerdealer1 is leaving the Trade - he cannot compete with the fly-by-night home traders that are sucking the lifeblood out of the industry. His story here It is, indeed, a sorry situation when any old bandit can pretend to be a Motor Dealer, buy a snotter out of the auction, stick a few hundred sovs over the bonnet and 'retail' it, without any consideration as to Warranty, VAT etc And yet they get away with it because there is no Official Registry of Bona Fide Motor Traders. No Licensed Motor Retailers and Repairers. No Society of Proper Blokes Selling Proper Cars. You get the drift. Am I in favour of having Official Licensed Traders? Well, I'm not so sure. For one it would be difficult to police, as there are so many levels within our business from Super Duper Franchised Megastores to the One Man Band and who would do the policing? As long as all Traders do the job properly, we should all be able to co-exist and earn a living. There will always be the chancers who see it as an easy way to make a few quid, but this has always been the case. So I'm not sure that having Licensed Traders would change anything. We can do a bit about it by making it difficult for them to get cars, although I don't expect any help from the Auction Houses on that score. I had one of these 'Home Traders' pop in this week (like most weeks, tbh) seeing if there were any 'choppers' he could buy to sell on. I asked for his VAT No. He didn't seem to have one. We had a brief chat about the moral and legal responsibilities of running a business these days and then he left. That was 10 minutes of my life I'm not going to get back, but it won't stop him. You see, I don't think the problem lies with us. It's the punters. As Wheelerdealer1 says, there are vast numbers of people who don't care about the quality, they just want it cheap. They have the VoucherCode mentality and for them profit is a 4 letter word (especially if they spell it prft). They're the ones you dread when their first question is "what's your best price?" before they've even seen the car. They don't care that you've prepped it properly, because you don't want them to die screaming in a ball of flame on the way home. They don't care that the Warranty you give will actually cover the parts it says it will, for longer than an Australian innings. They certainly couldn't give a monkey's willy about your overheads. They want your car, for the same price as the deathtrap they saw down the road, or they're going to buy that one. And they do. Maybe we need 2 separate categories of businesses and customers. The properly-run, legitimate ones can only deal with reasonable, sensible people and the greedy, scuzzy numpties can all just bugger off together.

Listening to Umesh on the car dealer podcast the other day and hearing that he fell into car sales after being a qualified mechanic it left me with a question. How many of us left school wanting to sell cars? Like Umesh I had no plans to sell cars when I left school. After a short lived career in the navy I was at a loose end when I got talking to a smart looking man wearing a flash suit and a Mecedes key ring placed next to him on the bar, he told me that he was a car salesman, said he loved the job even though the hours where long, rubbish basic of £50 per week but if you where good at it you could make a lot of money and get to drive a nice car for free. 2 days later I was selling Lada's. Be interested to hear how many of us fell into the trade, how many planned to come in it and did anyone have a worse first company car than me?

I seem to remember often hearing the term 'agent' describing a guy selling cars. Sounds like a good bet to me. Estate agents can sell a million pound house and not have to worry about phone calls in 3 months time because the floorboards are creaking or a tap is dripping?

Dunno, but the plane is going through next week as a Grade 3

Nearly a year now since we cancelled AT , never looked back, selling as many cars through eBay and local papers which we already had running for years before the cancelation! I really can't understand why people are still being bullied by them and made to feel that there's no life beyond AT! Come on people, wake up, get out of the rut and take them blinkers off.....there's a big annual saving to be made!

There is no catch and to be fair i like the website only trouble is RAC CARS is not known to the general public when searching for cars and so the site traffic is poor. But give it maybe a year or 2 and they may well be a contender.