Hitting all the Bases Selling a Used Car

Selling a used car is so much more pain-free these days - you just post a two-line classifieds ad on Craigslist, or better still on eBay Motors and you have your pick of the best customers in your entire city. But there is a problem with the power of the Internet - it is egalitarian; buyers have their pick of all the choice offerings around; they also have the Blue Book for pricing reference. You need to compete with the best on the market. Here's what you do when you get around to selling a used car.

If your reason to sell your current car is that you wish to buy a new one, the easiest thing you could think of to do would be to just trade in at the dealership. The dealership doesn't really do business in used cars; they are just the middleman. And dealing with the middleman is always more expensive. What you could do instead is to drive it out to a used car lot yourself and try to get the extra thousand dollars you would give up trading it in at the dealership.

Once your mind is made up over where you wiish to sell, you need to window-dress.The first step to selling a used car for a great price is bringing yourself to clean things up with a lot of attention given to detail. That's what a used car dealer does to get a used car ready to sell. There are a bunch of car detailing points to keep track of if your car is to come out looking and smelling pretty, fresh and clean. You can polish up tired-looking tires for about five dollars apiece; you can take it in for steam cleaning under the hood, use chrome polish, vacuum and shampoo the seats, and use Armor all on to the plastics. In the end, and you should have a car that looks a lot better than it actually might be. Making sure that all the bits and pieces that came with the car, the owner's manual, the toolset, the traffic warning triangle, are all in place, is pretty important too.

It really is true that you need to invest in anything to make a profit on it. There are lots of little things that can go wrong with a car over time - a blown parking light, squeaky brakes, a leaky door seal, a dent here and there. You could probably get all these fixed for under $200. You could probably get a paintless dent job for about $50 a dent. You'd probably add a couple of thousand to the value of the car for your trouble.

There are any number of places you could post your ad now to start selling a used car. You could put it on Craigslist, on Facebook, on anything. And to know what price to quote, you don't have to ask the dealer; you have the Kelly Blue Book. And when you post pictures online, make sure you get really flattering pictures of the nicest parts of the car out there. But there is a lot to be said for some unvarnished truth too. If there are any serious faults, posting pictures of those should help you earn yourself a few reputation points.

Whatever records you have of regular maintenance done on the car, post those online too. For $35, you could get a Carfax report on the car to prove to potential buyers that there have been no accidents. The more forthcoming you are, the more trust you win, and the quicker you'll sell the car for a good price. If you have a more expensive car to sell, try getting an official inspection done for just a little more than $100.

Make sure the price you list is slightly higher than the very lowest you're willing to take. Prospective buyers are sure to try to haggle it down a bit. Make sure you keep your wits about you when the buyer comes around, and make sure you don't let them go on a test drivewithout a photocopy of their driver's license.