3:52 pm, May 20, 2010
ANOTHER one bites the dust! Our bid to turn £0 into a Porsche 911 has climbed another rung of the ladder with the second of our starting duo finding a new home.
The VW Golf MkIII – donated to the cause by Motorpoint’s Auction4Cars.com arm – was sold on eBay last night for £250.
Yes, we might have been able to get a bit more for it if we’d shelled out to get it through an MOT (it had two months left), but we decided to cut it loose and get it sold quickly instead.
An honest and detailed desciption – complete with this cheesy video – did the trick and the buyer is collecting on Sunday morning. We hope…
We did have to fend off a few stupid questions with this one too. One potential bidder asked if we’d be happy to deliver it to Exeter.
Er, no. No we wouldn’t.
Thinking about it, what I should of said is ‘Yes we’d be delighted to deliver it to Exeter as long as you pay £500 for the car’. That’s where my lacking sales skills let me down.
Anyway, our pot is now up to £1,040.03p ready to buy the next car. We’ve incurred a few costs so far which include:
£36 – eBay commission for Audi
£36 – eBay commission and listing for Golf (hardly seems fair that one)
£112 – 6 months tax for the Golf
That’s a total of £184 which we’ll chuck into the pot to keep our total for BEN as high as possible.
TIME CONSUMING
What I wasn’t bargaining for with this feature was the amount of time it’s taking up. I didn’t think about the time spent cleaning, taking pictures, making videos, listing things, fending off stupid questions, etc.
What’s more we’ve worked out there’s going to be quite a lot more selling to do between now and the Porsche, especially as we now have to buy the cars ourselves.
If we can make an average of £500 a trade – a tall order, I know – between now and the £10k-ish we need for the 996, we’ll need to sell another 18 cars. That’s a lot of dodgy questions on eBay to deal with…
So where do we go from here? Well, we’re hoping a few of our dealer contacts will be able to help out with a tasty part exchange at a decent price. We’ve already got a rather hot iron in the fire, but are just waiting to find out if it’ll come off.
In the meantime, if you’ve got a part exchange that you could let us have that would make a healthy profit for BEN please get in touch. We need all the help we can get!
James
