What is it about for sale adverts?

[Deathrow]

I'm a fairly long time lurker on Retro Rides, I've commented on a small number of threads but largely I've just been peering in through the window. I don't really have an excuse either as I've been working on an '88 Austin Mini on and off over the last 10 years.

I'm currently on the lookout for a car to replace my now possibly dead daily (possibly more on that in another thread) and I've been noticing something and I wonder if anyone else experiences it or whether it's just me.

I'll spend a significant amount of time browsing Reader's Rides and scouring the 'net for inspiration on what car I should go looking for to replace the boring daily. I'll find something interesting that looks great and I'll feel like I need to own one. I'll head off on to Auto Trader, eBay, PistonHeads etc. and start looking at adverts for that car and suddenly it's like the magic is gone, I look at the pictures and I feel like I don't want anything to do with it anymore.

Does this happen to anyone else? Is it something about for sale adverts? Do people unknowingly take unflattering pictures of cars that they're trying to sell because they're trying to sell them?

Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, where do you find your cars?

[joem83]

Doesn't help that the used car market is a mess atm, everything is overpriced unfortunately. I sold my mk5 gti about 4 years ago, the same car/history but now 4 years older is still going for the same money! A 4 year old gti was about 9k in 2012, a 4 year old gti today is about 15k+

[joem83]

Just to add, best place for bargains is Facebook selling pages, just have to be prepared for lazy adverts with rude sell lol

[Darkspeed]

Its trying to find "the one" - similarly I quite fancy another bike and every now and again the interest gets to a point where I delve into the sites where they are found, only to come out of the exercise completely underwhelmed with what's on offer.
Cars wise I do get the occasional urge to buy a tin project as something different to the plastic ones - A quick run through what people are wanting price wise for utter sheds based on what a finished one "may" be worth kills those thoughts. Just pays to keep looking because eventually the one will turn up and it may not be what you thought you wanted in the first place.

[keyring]

I find the exact same thing, and as you say, it’s as if a click of the fingers and all interest has gone. For cheap cars now, Facebook certainly seems the new gumtree, I’ve found The same as joem83 has said, a lot of used cars are overpriced these days

[Deleted]

I find "Wanted" ads are brilliant.
Put your price range in and it weeds out the idiots, but might reel in the person not wanting the usual assortment of lonely hearts/chancers/joy-riders etc ringing, if they had a car for sale.
And a LOT of people are terrified of the horror stories of robbery/scams etc from on-line sources.
I've had great success with my ad's.
Especially on specific group Facebook pages.

[mikehamid]

I totally get your frustrations. I've been trying for a new daily for over 6 months now and nothing is appearing for decent money! It seems that prices are appreciating far too much to make it worth buying second hand now. To make matters worse, I can't get one on finance as I don't expect to still be in the country in the next three years.

Not to mention the rubbish sales pitches and adverts. If I see the cliches "It is what it is it ain't what it ain't", "pulls like a train" or anything as ridiculous as that, I have learnt that this is code for bag of wibblepoo and the seller has no brain or imagination. The lack of coherent English used in the motor trade is a scary reflection of our failed approach to education in recent decades.

Don't get me started on traders not replying to emails. Not handy as I can't call during working hours.

[darrenh]

I'm finding a growing trend of lazy half arsed adverts for 80s stuff, high asking prices and the advert being curt and dismissive.

just being for sale is the top selling feature, almost like they are doing you a favour that it's even for sale

If the advert says "No messers" it almost certainly means the seller is.

[joem83]

Jun 27, 2018 20:07:58 GMT mikehamid said:

I totally get your frustrations. I've been trying for a new daily for over 6 months now and nothing is appearing for decent money! It seems that prices are appreciating far too much to make it worth buying second hand now. To make matters worse, I can't get one on finance as I don't expect to still be in the country in the next three years.

Not to mention the rubbish sales pitches and adverts. If I see the cliches "It is what it is it ain't what it ain't", "pulls like a train" or anything as ridiculous as that, I have learnt that this is code for bag of wibblepoo and the seller has no brain or imagination. The lack of coherent English used in the motor trade is a scary reflection of our failed approach to education in recent decades.

Don't get me started on traders not replying to emails. Not handy as I can't call during working hours.

Warrington Seat have the Leon Cupra 300 DSG on pch for 289 pm @ 1+23 with 8k p/a if that's any use.

[mikehamid]

Jun 27, 2018 20:29:23 GMT joem83 said:

Jun 27, 2018 20:07:58 GMT mikehamid said:

I totally get your frustrations. I've been trying for a new daily for over 6 months now and nothing is appearing for decent money! It seems that prices are appreciating far too much to make it worth buying second hand now. To make matters worse, I can't get one on finance as I don't expect to still be in the country in the next three years.

Not to mention the rubbish sales pitches and adverts. If I see the cliches "It is what it is it ain't what it ain't", "pulls like a train" or anything as ridiculous as that, I have learnt that this is code for bag of wibblepoo and the seller has no brain or imagination. The lack of coherent English used in the motor trade is a scary reflection of our failed approach to education in recent decades.

Don't get me started on traders not replying to emails. Not handy as I can't call during working hours.

Warrington Seat have the Leon Cupra 300 DSG on pch for 289 pm @ 1+23 with 8k p/a if that's any use.

That's too much for me to be honest. Plus I'm after a frugal commuter for a 70 mile per day commute. I was thinking Dacia Sandero Stepway. Although £130p/m is fine, I might not be in the country in 6 months.

[joem83]

Jun 27, 2018 21:10:47 GMT mikehamid said:

That's too much for me to be honest. Plus I'm after a frugal commuter for a 70 mile per day commute. I was thinking Dacia Sandero Stepway. Although £130p/m is fine, I might not be in the country in 6 months.

To pricey for me as well, but it's such a good deal I keep telling people lol

[mikehamid]

Jun 27, 2018 21:19:39 GMT joem83 said:

Jun 27, 2018 21:10:47 GMT mikehamid said:

That's too much for me to be honest. Plus I'm after a frugal commuter for a 70 mile per day commute. I was thinking Dacia Sandero Stepway. Although £130p/m is fine, I might not be in the country in 6 months.

To pricey for me as well, but it's such a good deal I keep telling people lol

It's not bad, but this is also BMW or Mercedes money. So I think I'd rather go for that for the price.

It'll be a cracking used buy though later.

[Deathrow]

Well I'm partly glad it's not just me and partly sad that this is the state of car buying these days.

joem83, I did actually wonder that. It seemed like everything I looked at three and a half years ago when I bought my last car seemed to be near enough the same price now. Well, everything except Astra H's, which is what I bought and as a result has gone down in value like you would expect it to have in that time.

Facebook does seem to return more results than eBay and Auto Trader. I was having a quick look at Mitsubishi FTOs (whatever happened to those, they never really seemed to get that popular) and Facebook had way more adverts than eBay and AT combined. Like others have mentioned though the quality of the adverts are dreadful; vertical phone pictures (sometimes screenshots of pictures), adverts with no information that just say "inbox for details" and my all time favourite "first to see will buy".

darrenh, it wouldn't be so bad that they leave you to do all the legwork like asking a million questions because they only want to respond in grunts and nods if they at least reflected their laziness in the price. Like you say, it's as if they believe they're doing you a favour posting an advert online of their car that they've not even bothered to hoover before hand.

[surprisingskoda]

Have you found any adverts yet where the sole picture is an instagram one, with a caption across the middle of it, saying something like "luk at ma new whip lol"
Or is it snapchat where you put captions across the middle of it?

Either way, dreadful, instant avoid. Very hard to buy a car at the minute I feel, a good one anyway, and very hard to sell one also.

[joem83]

Jun 27, 2018 23:01:17 GMT surprisingskoda said:

Have you found any adverts yet where the sole picture is an instagram one, with a caption across the middle of it, saying something like "luk at ma new whip lol"
Or is it snapchat where you put captions across the middle of it?

Daily occurrence on all fb selling pages I'm on lol. Always a rubbish car, with rubbish mods, with terrible information, and no price.

[skkylinedave]

Jun 27, 2018 23:57:41 GMT joem83 said:

Jun 27, 2018 23:01:17 GMT surprisingskoda said:

Have you found any adverts yet where the sole picture is an instagram one, with a caption across the middle of it, saying something like "luk at ma new whip lol"
Or is it snapchat where you put captions across the middle of it?

Daily occurrence on all fb selling pages I'm on lol. Always a rubbish car, with rubbish mods, with terrible information, and no price.

Not true .... do they not usually have a price of £1234567 !!!


Really is difficult trying to find decent value cars . I was after a mk4 diesel golf a while back and every one was a heap that had been neglected and ruined in that persons ownership but was ' mint' apparently . Wing mirrors missing , locks not working , bald tyres , accident damage and usually cannot even be bothered to wash or hoover it .

Honestly i see this on cars even up to 5k or so - i am not going to buy a car with half of the Somme in the footwell thats clearly never been serviced or even washed in its ownership .

One good thing about FB is you can look at the person and see if they are the sort of person you really thing is good to buy a car off !

One bad thing is trying to find a car thats not hidiously over priced being sold by Romanian backstreet  car dealers as well , they almost swamp the market around here so that there are literally only there double mark up cars to buy .

[ChasR]

I think the issue is that now many people don't maintain their cars as well as they used to. This comes down to a few reasons including:

-IME most indies tend to break cars more than they fix them. If you do find a good garage specialist they tend to be miles away and/or with a waiting list to match. Oh, and price. I'll have to fix my sister's Saab after going in for AC work. I could get them to fix it but I've been here before. As luckyseven said no one takes more care of your own car than you. After all, you paid for it.
-If you want it working right most people won't do the work right because it costs money. A friend of mine has a MkIV Golf GT TDI. He doesn't really spanner on his daily; he saves that for his other retros. Per year he's £50 a week worse off for having that MkIV. That includes the hassle of going back and forth to garages and of course sorting things out.
-Hassle; It's the single reason people get a new lease deal now. I've debated getting a VAG or BMW at times with an approved used warranty; it's the only warranty I've seen where they do fix the cars.

With my M3 I almost lost the motivation to buy one. I saw 5 and pretty much most of them had issues all over and bodges done over the years to 'save' on running costs.

I do look on Facebook at times but IMHO whenever I've looked most cars tend to be snotters on there, generally sold because they don't want them anymore due to being a pain. The few that aren't either go quickly because they were cheap or people chastise the advert because "My mate got one for £800 and it's mint". Mint is such an overused word for cars that are generally in good condition. For that reason I very rarely put a car for sale on Facebook. My Mercedes isn't on there for that reason.

At the risk of pimping my own stuff, but offering a suggestion for a daily as well as a critique for my advert here's a car I may be selling. It doesn't 'need' to go, but I'd be best off putting my efforts into the 2CV. Plus I only ever bought my Merc as a winter smoker, never to go abroad in it and do a rally!

forum.retro-rides.org/thread/204762/1991-mercedes-w124-manual-warwick

Some on here feel I am being picky about the bodywork who have seen the car in the flesh but my old man generally makes a big deal on other people's car about any defects, and I mean any.

[joem83]

I have found on fb, that marque specific local group pages that more effort is put into adverts and that the cars are generally better, whereas local car sales pages are a lucky dip. Also local non car specific sales pages (I'm on one for the posher area of Sheffield lol) yields well looked after cars that are either really underpriced or really overpriced lol.

I got my mk2 off Facebook as nobody wanted it, advert was decent, price was cheap as he wouldn't give it a jump start and confirm it ran (which it did lol)

[skinnylew]

Yeah I have that all the time, get inspired then look around and feel uninspired. Which is a good thing because I have too many cars, not enough space and not enough time!!!!!
I think a perfect daily retro would be an Audi A3 sport in Paradise Green. Like this one......

forum.retro-rides.org/thread/204573/audi-sport-paradise-green-london

😁

[Dez]

Man I wish I was like you lot. I talk myself into buying any old curse word before I've even seen it purely based on coolness/rarity!

I've bought 4 cars in the last 3 months, one was strong money and described as far better than it actually was, but is rare. If I'd have passed it up id have had to look at importing to get another so worth paying slighlty more than I wanted to for it as it would have cost way more to import, plus the minefield of condition on a car 3000 miles away versus the one in front of me. . Next was a project, again not particularly cheap, but a steal for what it is.
Other two were sub-£500, one was an mot fail but has a set of wheels worth twice what I paid for it- a week later it's MOTed anyway. Last one was dragged out of a hedge where it had sat for 12 years and I bought it immediately purely because it rare to see one registered 100% correctly.

And for those moaning that stuff isn't depreciating as it should- it's not the car is worth more, it's your money that's worth less...