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Hi, Who are you using for your extended warranties? We have been with WarrantyWise for a while and have been pretty pleased with them. They have paid out for approx half the claims made which I find is not bad. How do your providers compare? Nick

I often say (especially to a husband and wife team or a team of 3 or more buyers) when they start finding tiny scratches that we'll kindly knock off £100 for every scratch mark they find. Quickly they reach the magic figure of £500 which I then deduct from the original list price when NEW (printed on the CAP or Glass valuation part of the HPI Report) and inevitably our car is still a lot lot cheaper. We all have a little laugh reminding each other that we are not looking at a new car and more often than not this works and we still have a deal. The customers get a box of chocolates rather than £500 off and still leave quite pleased.

I carry an iPad with me at the auctions (with 3G internet anywhere) and BCA provide CAP values in the PDF version of their catalogues. For main dealer part exes (which is what we buy mostly) CAP is a lot more accurate for the trade price and this is what I use. Same for part exchanges but for the last two years we also do WeBuyAnyCar valuation just to make sure that our customer always gets more than WBAC quoted. Setting the selling price is a lot harder and is a combination of CAP Retail, Deltapoint and looking at the Autotrader values in our area. By the way: Do you round-up your prices on AT for example £5000 rather then £4995? We've been doing it for years (rounding up or down) and it works well. Nick

Hi Umesh, Congrats on your recent award! We also like to go to great lengths to get the full spec on cars we are considering for stock and we are finding the customers love those three page printouts with the HPi Spec Check data. When they see an executive car with £6-7K of options they even forget to haggle. For Merc I email their UK customer services (very useful for service histories too!) on cs.uk@cac.mercedes-benz.com, for BMW we call them on the pound-per-minute 0906 number and with Volvo I either call customer relations on 01628 422522 or if I have more time I ask a friendly parts advisor from a local main dealer to print me the spec/radio codes which they hold on a central system. With the Japanese brands I find that the HPI system is accurate enough. Nick