The pros and cons of selling your car to a dealership

The pros and cons of selling your car to a dealership

Posted on November 12, 2021

If you have a car to sell, you can sell it privately, use a car buying service or sell your car to a dealership. While we are obviously biased towards selling to a dealership, we appreciate there are downsides to it.

That’s what we’re going to discuss today. The pros and cons of selling your car to a dealership.

Pros of selling your car to a dealership

There are a number of upsides to selling your car to a dealership. They include:

Sell fast

Selling privately means you have to prepare the car, write the ad, take pictures, wait for a response, work with viewings and test drives.

Selling to a dealership means making an appointment, preparing the car, turning up and getting an offer. It’s a much faster way to sell a car, ideal if you need cash fast.

Safer than selling privately

We all know the potential risks of selling cars. While the vast majority go without a hitch, enough end badly to make us all wary of selling a car privately.

Sell your car to a dealership and you can do it in the comfort and safety of our dealership and get paid direct into your bank. Nothing comes close in terms of keeping you safe.

Convenience

No waiting around for phone calls from buyers. No having to meet for inspections or handle test drives. No having to have a buddy around for safety or having to answer obvious questions already answered within the ad.

All things we know are significant downsides to selling privately!

Better prices than ever

The main downside of selling to a dealership or trading in was price. Fortunately, we can now afford to pay more than ever for good quality used cars.

While we still fall a little short of the price you would get privately, considering all the pros above, we still think selling to us is the best option.

Cons of selling your car to a dealership

There are also downsides to selling your car to a dealership, such as:

Not quite market rate

As we mentioned above, while dealerships can pay more than before, they do still short of what you would get privately.

Private car sales are ‘sold as seen’. As long as your ad was accurate and you portrayed the vehicle truthfully, that’s it.

People expect more from a dealership, including warranty. Preparing, or reconditioning, a car ready for resale means a lot of work for us.

We need to perform mechanical checks, safety and roadworthiness checks and do everything we can to deliver a car worthy of our name. All that costs money, which is why dealers can rarely match market rate.

No modified cars

The other downside is that we don’t usually buy modified cars. That’s not what our target market wants to buy or would expect from our dealerships.

Light modifications like new alloys or privacy glass are fine but anything more than that and we won’t be able to help you. We would struggle to sell the car on one of our lots.

As you can see, there are more upsides than downsides to selling your car to a dealership. Contact one of our team if you have something to sell!

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