After many enjoyable months of reading the forum, I've finally taken the plunge and become a member I don't want to bore everyone to death with my history in the trade but I've done things a bit back to front in that I started out with a retail pitch and then got smaller and smaller! I'm at the point now where I'm only part-time and my ideal scenario would be to specialise in a few prestige cars. In the past, I always found the best margins in the prestige sector - to be honest, I always struggled to make more than a few hundred quid on anything mainstream simply because there is always so much competition! I always found it a bit baffling that many local dealers do well on small cars but for me they are a complete no no! Almost anything small and low mileage makes pretty much the same price at auction as I can sell them for! I tend to find very high milers a lot easier to sell than low milers.
As the years have gone by, it seems much harder to source decent stock and the preparation costs of prestige cars can be astronomically high. One big problem of being small is that if you buy the occasional clunker it takes a fair bit of time to recoup your losses. If you are buying and selling hundreds a year the odd inevitable headache car isn't really such a problem. There have been times in recent years where I've seriously considered packing it in! Although ex-lease cars are the safest buys at auction, unless it's something very high spec, there's simply too much competition out there. More recently, I've been concentrating on part exchanges from the big dealer groups at auction but inevitably, a lot of people tend to trade their car in when something plays up with it. I've been a tad unlucky in that department in recent years so it's great to find such a good forum where everyone seems so friendly and helpful. Buying and selling cars can be a bit of a lonely game in some ways so it's good to hear other trader's experiences on here.
I'm a bit old fashioned in that I always prefer to attend the auctions, in fact I've only ever bought one car online and I had 8 days of anxiety waiting for it to be delivered but thankfully it was all fine when it arrived. I always find it amusing at the block as you overhear so many dealers who seem to be selling more cars than Car Giant! This forum is brilliant for being so honest and down to earth and it is an absolute mine of information! I only wish this forum was around 20 years ago when I started.........mind you, if it was I may have never have started in the first place! If you think of all the things that could go wrong with car dealing, you'd never do it!
Anyway, I'll keep it short but I'm looking forward to contributing more in the future and all the very best to everyone on here.