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Comment by joshmlewis | Hacker News Reader

I've bought and sold a lot of cars the past few years. I have never once considered a dealer trade in offer. I've had relatively easy and good luck with selling my car online through Craigslist and Autotrader which I imagine is what they will probably do to unload the cars.

I like the idea of the service but I'm wondering what the difference is between dealer trade in pricing and market pricing. Even if I have to sacrifice a couple grand to not have to do the whole process, I'm ok with that but I'd rather know pricing from that point of view.

I'm also curious how you plan on doing the legal paperwork as I've done a lot of this too and it's not easy getting setup to handle all the paperwork especially if it's between two parties.

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Great questions Josh,

Dealer trade-in pricing generally uses a standard called "black book". They base the pricing on the type of car the the condition of the vehilce. The discount of retail to black book varies, but can be huge (4k+). When dealers buy a car off trade-in, they have to price in the fact that they have a lot of overhead to get the car sold. Dealers also price risk into the car value, if it's not a desirable car, they will sell it at auction. They have to make sure they stay under the auction value.

Individual buyers don't have that. That spread is pretty large and we can take advantage of that.

The paperwork is actually pretty straight forward if you have a notary public available (we do). We can pull up all the paperwork necessary and generally get it done at each persons convenience. The biggest issue is actually trust between the parties and us. That's what we have to work on.

I think Josh is trying to point out that comparing your price to a dealer trade-in price is a bit of a joke since trade-in price is always a 'low ball' based on market value.

I actually came in the thread to post the same thing because I saw that on your web site and chuckled.

It would also help to list prices you guys sold cars at, not just 'X' over 'trade-in' price.

The way numbers are presented and compared makes you look a bit sketchy to somebody who knows a thing or two about vehicles.

You can generally post on Craiglist and get offers within a day that beat a trade-in offer. People sit on car listings and offer low-ball prices that are still above how awful dealer trade-in offers are.

I don't think selling a car is really that difficult of a process, for me anyway. I don't know what California paperwork is like, but in Ohio, all you need to do is sign your title over in front of a notary. Besides that, it's just a matter of listing it on Craiglist and scheduling times to look at it.

In California it's even easier than getting a notary - you just need signatures on the title ("pink slip"), and then both parties can fill an online form for transfer or liability. The buyer then goes and hands over the title to the DMV at some point in the next (10) days, getting a new title in the mail.

For as well me I've had a decent experience on Craigslist - just some due diligence and research on best practices and you're good to go. But it does take some time and patience and dealing with flaky buyers. Just ignore the lowballers and the non-serious. However I'm sure a lot of people would love this type of service, especially in common scenarios where the actual seller is busy so they try to proxy it to a family member who really isn't interested in selling it. Or when they've moved out of state and buyers don't want to deal with that

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