Quote:
Originally Posted by marksmd95
Does anyone know if there's a way to check to see how much a car sold at auction? I'm looking at a car from a local dealer who bought it at auction...It would be helpful to know how much they paid for it.
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Though it won't give you a specific price for any given car, you can use the wholesale prices/trade-in prices found on any number of websites as a rough guide. Some good sources:
Another useful resource is lease values. Compare the sum of lease payments made during the term of the lease with the lease's stated residual value for the car. The wholesale value should be something around the lower of the MSRP less the sum of lease payments, or the stated residual value.
The one thing you can be certain of is that he markup on used cars is far higher than that of new cars. Dealerships can stay in business doing nothing but selling used cars. They cannot do so selling only new cars.
How do I know that's so? Look around. Have you ever seen a car dealership that does nothing at all but sell new cars? If there were money to be made doing nothing but selling new cars, there' d be businesses doing just that.
The fact is that the high profit margins are in service and used car sales. That is so for many reasons, not the least of which is the difficulty consumers have in obtaining the selling price -- at auction -- of used cars.
All the best.