Nick M.K.

I don't think so but I'm never sure which package I am on. My listings are not "featured". Your invoice summary Total inc. VAT £1,372.67 Advertising Package £1,105.50 Finance £38.39 Forecourt Management - Auto Trader Dealer Website - Retailer Display - Added Value - Subtotal excl. VAT £1,143.89 VAT ( 20%) £228.78 Total £1,372.67

13 (11+2) on Autotrader £1370 up to 25 on eBaymotorspro £210 up to 20 on Motors.co.uk £97 I always have 14-15 in stock of which a couple are always in prep 9-12 sales per month

But still got 120 views in a day? My very desirable fast sellers get 40-50. Your target customer is a Polish or Romanian national in his late 20s early 30s and unfortunately right now they have already made their annual pilgrimage back to the homeland (they look at your ad on their mobiles right now). When they return at the end of the month they will resume their search for a cheap prestige mile munching chariot to use on the next year's journey and your desirability will shoot right up :-) Fingers Crossed.

Why? It came to you at the right money, you can't go and buy another at the same money and the other two dealers may have examples that are inferior to yours. £500 extra on this margin is a huge percentage and worth aiming for. If you said you'd had 6 views on it I'd say: get rid of it quick. There is nothing more rewarding than selling for more than the immediate competition :-)

That's plenty of views. One was from me. Why not increase the price to £4500? On a 55 plate it will be one of the last before the £500 tax comes into play so to some it should be more desirable than 2006 even 2007 at this age...

What I will say to anyone in this price bracket is to go have a look at a few auction sale sections by big finance companies if there are any near you (Black Horse, Moneybarn, Santander etc). When you see the values and the condition of the cars that go through these sales you'll know if they attracts prime, subprime or the plain crazy :-)

+1. And this is 15 years at the start of the agreement!

I don't think it is, I think it calculates the actual days from advertising to Mark as Sold. My Stock Desirability hovers around the 2.7 mark all the time but my days to turn have been anything from 18 to 60+ in the past couple of years. I don't look at it because I advertise sometimes even before the car arrives, often before it is actually ready and leave the adverts running long after it's sold (for a number of reasons).

I get "flyers" all the time. I offer free airport collection in my adverts. They are from Ireland mostly, a few from Scotland but this month I had a young chap fly from Trondheim in Norway to buy a RAV4 for under £5K. He will be based here for the next year so didn't exactly fly-to-buy only. Years ago I had an elderly couple from Sweden that bought a Volvo C70 Convertible (it was worth around £3K at the time). They flew in and immediately drove off back to Sweden in mid-January. The cheapest "export" was a £500 Merc 190D 2.5 (no turbo and 0-60 "but only just") that went to a North African chap based in Brussels. This was many years ago, that car in that condition now is probably worth ten times that to someone here...

No. M Sport Coupe in Space Grey, Red leather, 16K miles, Great Price. 1) because it was a manual 2) because 4 people wanted to buy it and all 4 were declined for the finance :-)

100% would certainly be better but as I wrote above acceptance is also depending on stock profile. Prime lenders have to look at "affordability" now, not just credit history and score. We had a £17K BMW 420D in stock for 5 months. 4 people wanted to buy, all four were declined, three of them because of affordability. In a deal like this I'll take 50% acceptance any day :-)

With our prime lender, yes, and this is a good number compared to others. Also bear in mind this number is dependent on stock profile. Young buyers with good credit history will not be approved for an expensive car which the lender deems to be "unaffordable" for them to run long term. If we had a large yard full of Fiestas acceptance would be higher. Most of the "declines" will then go to subprime lenders but the commission from them is so small that we might as well forget it in this topic about being paid for our time.

Oh, this, absolutely. But because I run my business completely by myself I see every penny as I personally spend it and always try to pay bottom dollar for anything. Which used to make the spreadsheets even more painful :-)

If you did do finance you wouldn't charge a penny for the admin. For the simple reason that your finance company would pay you a HEFTY commission for your time and even if the comm is only say £350 per deal it would compensate your time at a grand an hour assuming acceptance rate of 50% and around 10 minutes to submit an application.* *Our lender is Close, they require no additional paperwork other than a Driving License and it takes me 5-6 minutes to submit an application. My acceptance rate is 47%, take up rate is 93% (so virtually everyone who was accepted bought).

I used to have all these. Costs, costs, costs, you name it it was all there. Every penny. Horrible read. Then I deleted them all. Now I only have my stock book in Excel and I have to say: Ignorance is a bliss. I genuinely don't know what I am earning per month or year or per "unit sold". I know it may not be an obvious decision from a management point of view but my every year is better than the last. Just don't ask me exactly how much better.

I actually know a dealer in Bedfordshire that charges £50 "test drive deposit" so it seems your idea might just catch on :-)

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Removed duplicated post.

Your price is £1525 OVNO. Get rid of the OVNO. Don't give punters too much hope. Drop the price to £1500 exactly to appear in more searches or to £1490 so you beat hundreds of cars at the £1495 price point. Stay a bit back from the car when you photograph it On your ad you have a mileage of 52414, the dash shows 52466. Keep the figures exactly the same or round the mileage to 50K to appear in much more searches. Put a bit more text in your ad, tell them about your convenient location or list more of the options of the car. It's a heatwave and I can't see the words AIR CONDITIONING anywhere. 8 stamp service history, take a photo and show it. EVERY LITTLE MINOR DETAIL MAKES A DIFFERENCE in car sales online and means people will simply go buy somewhere else if you don't have an eye for detail.

Same one, same car. Taken in p/x in AUG '17, left in my storage yard until November '17. In Aug I had thought of advertising it for £3990 but couldn't get round to it. This was very lucky indeed.

Last winter I sold a very nice and clean but not very low mileage 2002 BMW Z3 2.2 with the smallest 6 cyl engine, 74K miles. £7389, listed it in November, sold it just after Christmas after a lot of interest, multiple calls, emails, website hits etc. The BMW specialists on the old AT forum thought the price was quite high but the market clearly didn't.

45-60 years old, the "I've always wanted one of these" type who couldn't own one until the kids grew up, someone with at least one more car or van on their drive and someone who would not be interested in that car if the price was under £2K. Also don't compare prices on a 4 cylinder and 6 cylinder BMW E46s. It's the big old petrols everyone wants.

I think they start with a loose idea of what they want to spend, then start looking at the cheapest available stock, then increase their budget after they see a couple of "not-as-tidy-as-we-had-hoped" examples and ultimately pay a completely different figure to what they started with. Exactly the same process I go through every time I book a hotel for a short holiday (only I do it all online)...

Still worth 10% of it's price when new.

Can I guess it James? German. Automatic. White. Dark wheels.