8:03 am, July 21, 2024
Car enthusiasts are a funny old bunch, aren’t they?
Just recently, I’ve encountered more than my fair share of them, as I’ve moved my business model away from common or garden mainstream motors to those of a more specialist nature.
The reasons for this are two-fold. First, I’m a dinosaur, and the reality is that I’ll hopefully be lying with my feet up by a pool in a Mediterranean villa when the younger guard are rapidly adapting to explaining charging processes, battery capacities and other such gobbledegook to customers.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not anti-EV and I do understand why electric cars make sense, but I’m at a stage in my career where reinvesting what little savings I have into a forecourt full of charging points and trying to get my head around what a kilowatt-hour is and the many different ways of generating one just scares me.
At the moment, I have two plastic cans – a green one and a black one – and if a car runs out of motion while in my care, I simply grab one of those, tip the contents in the tank and we’re back in business. After all, the fuel light is something that every car dealer wears like a badge of honour.
Nobody trades in a motor with a full tank, after all. Anyway, my new business model is essentially my old business model reinvented. I sell cars that I know how to operate and repair, and as they get older, the type of customer changes.
The sort of person who buys an old Jaguar or Volvo estate these days is more than likely an enthusiast – or at least someone who appreciates the analogue nature of such vehicles and is very often prepared to pay quite a decent sum for the privilege.
It’s working, too. I can find stock inexpensively, and if I prepare it properly, I can sell it for a reasonable uplift, so if something old and vaguely interesting comes along at the right price, I’ll give it a go. The only problem here is that with enthusiasts come ‘experts’.
I was taught from an early age that an ex is a has-been and a spurt is a drip under pressure, so I’ve never been a huge fan of these types of individual, not least because their incredible self-belief often leads to a sense of delusion.
For example, just recently I had a 2003 MG ZR in stock. It’s the kind of car that when new appealed to a baseball-capped hooligan in need of something to replace the Citroen Saxo VTR they’d recently hurled into a ditch.
Today, that baseball-capped hooligan is more than likely in his early forties and wants to kick off his mid-life crisis early by reliving his youth – and my role here is to help him out by finding really tidy examples and making sure that they leave me in tip-top order. After all, 90% of doing this job properly comes from preparation and presentation – I’ll let nobody tell me anything otherwise.
Anyway, the ZR I acquired was sourced via Facebook Marketplace, which has become a good hunting ground for me on the basis that many of the adverts on there attract illiterate vermin looking to screw over buyers.
A bold claim, maybe, but it’s something that I’ve been told time and time again by the sellers I’ve bought cars from, whose relief at receiving a polite and articulate message expressing an interest in the car is often enough to make them almost give it to me for free.
The MG belonged to an old chap who’d hung up his driving gloves in 2020, leaving the car parked up in his garage. I went to have a look at it, saw it had loads of potential and handed over his asking price haggle-free to save him from the knuckle-draggers.
After all, even car dealers have a conscience. Well, some of us do, anyway. Six weeks later, I had it for sale – fully serviced, new tyres and a small amount of welding to both rear inner sills were required, and this was all mentioned in the advert, along with close-up images of a couple of parking dents and some loose interior trim.
It was spotted by a Facebook ‘community’ of people who like MG Z Cars and, if reading some of their other posts was to be believed, Nigel Farage and misogyny. Anyway, my detailed advert, to which more than 140 photographs were attached, sparked some lively discussion around the car’s value, ranging from ‘scrap it’ to ‘£800 if he’s lucky’.
Sadly, that led to one young enthusiast believing their rhetoric and withdrawing his interest in the car because I’d ‘overpriced’ it.
Now, far be it from me to sound bitter, but I’d wager that a grumpy old Brummie with more than four decades behind him of selling cars has a better idea of values than a 19-year-old who made the mistake of asking bulldog enthusiast SteveZRFanBro (not his real handle) from Redditch his opinion – and ultimately it was his loss.
I sold the car to a lovely 40-something chap who travelled a long way to collect it and we shook hands at £200 below my asking price, which is bang-on what I expected. Just don’t tell the ‘experts’…
This column appears in the current edition of Car Dealer – issue 197 – along with news, views, reviews, features and much more! Read and download it for free here.
