One thing I learned early is to negotiate the purchase outright before you talk about leasingortrade-ins.

Once you've gotten the sticker price where you want it (one way to do this is to play a few dealers off each other on the trim level you want, without regard to color), then you can negotiate the sale of the other car to them separately. If you did a good job on the sticker price, they may not even be willing to take your trade-in at any price. The only exception to this might be when you're offering them a good car that they can move faston their own lot. Otherwise, they're sending it to auction, a broker-middleman is taking his cut, etc.

You can see where Carvana is making their end by taking all those guys out of it, skimming the good cars off the top and selling them directly on their website - and the synergy of getting customers to the website to do a deal, then putting the inventory right in front of them. I was tempted to buy one when I sold them the Toyota.

I’ve only dealt with Auto Nation. Car Max quoted me $20k on my 15 Tundra and Auto Nation gave me $28k. That’s a big difference. They would have paid the same to buy or trade in. It also might be a regional thing.

You sure? I drive by every make of car dealership from Lambos down to Kia and the lots are jam packed.... They not selling those?This is a very fair point. If you're selling, there is a very good chance you're buying as well. They give you a little extra cheese, you probably instinctively see what that will get you on their site - and for x% of people they do a trade. They skim money off the financing....

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New car shortage driving up used car prices

New car shortage drives up used car prices
By Bethany Davis | June 2, 2021 at 5:59 AM CDT - Updated June 2 at 9:28 AM
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WSFA) - New cars are hard to come by. It seems there’s a shortage of new cars hitting the lots, and it’s driving up the prices of used cars.

“I should have 300 Chrysler products on the ground this time of year; we got 61,” said Dick Brewbaker, owner of Brewbaker Motors in Montgomery.

That’s the story around the country right now. The shortage is driving the demand for used cars skyrocketing, along with their prices.

“In my 25 years in the industry, I’ve never seen such a quick uptick and use car prices ever before,” explained Scot Hall, who works with Swap-a-lease, a company that helps people transfer their vehicle leases.


Hall says, at least for now, there’s not much difference in the value of a used car and a new one.

“If you have a just used vehicle right now, it may be worth as much as it was new, which is kind of a crazy phenomenon,” said Hall. The reason starts with the pandemic and the shutdown that happened last year.

“We had a lack of new vehicles, not because of any supply chain issues necessarily just because people weren’t going to work to produce them, you know, everybody’s kind of in a holding pattern,” Hall explained.

Now there’s a shortage of computer microchips used in cars for everything from dashboard displays to adjusting the seats. Without those microchips, cars aren’t coming off the production line.