8:39 am, April 29, 2023
Anyone who works in the car trade will tell you that one of the biggest challenges at the moment is finding stock.
In the auction houses and in the small ads, it’s a bun fight. To get the cars with the margins attached, you have to be first on the scene and watching the internet morning, noon and night.
It’s one of the reasons why, in recent times, I’ve moved to selling more unusual stuff – performance cars, convertibles, modern classics.
It’s just too dog-eat-dog out there for a gentleman of my advancing years to even get drawn into a bidding war over something as unmemorable as a Vauxhall Corsa or a Kia whatever-the-boring-mid-size-SUV-is-called.
As such, I spend a lot of my time looking for the weird stuff that most mainstream dealers wouldn’t know what to do with but which I know has a pretty lucrative niche market.
Late-Nineties and early-2000s stuff in the right kind of condition is good news to a certain type of buyer.
And it was that type of buyer to whom the lovely, original and unmodified Skoda Octavia vRS would have appealed when I saw it advertised on Gumtree the other week.
It looked right in the photos, the paperwork was spot on, the mileage was reasonable and the MOT history online was flawless.
Plus at £1,300, it was also cheap enough to more than double its money with the right level of prep and the correct marketing, so I decided to have a go on it.
It was a cheapie, but a goodie. One that would be easy to sell and cover this week’s electricity bill. (I think I’m joking, but based on last month’s bill, I’m not sure.)
I dropped the vendor a message and asked if I could go and view it, to which he responded positively with lots of information about the car but no mention of where he lived.
So I replied to say I was definitely very interested but he’d need to send me his address so I could go and have a look at it.
The response was radio silence, despite a follow-up message just in case he’d not seen the first one.
I therefore presumed that in the meantime, someone else had come along with the readies and bought it, and irritating as that would be, as someone who sells cars for a living I fully understand that the first person to put the money in your hand gets the prize.
I chalked it down to experience and continued looking for similar-aged stock elsewhere.
Two days later, while idly browsing Facebook Marketplace, a very familiar Skoda appeared. Same price, same photos. Rather puzzled, I dropped the vendor a message.
A similar exchange ensued. On Gumtree, you don’t know who you’re talking to, so he had no idea it was the same chap, and I asked pretty much the same questions.
‘Please can I come and view the car?’
‘Yes, sure.’
‘Excellent. When can I come round and what’s your address, please?’
Silence. Absolute radio silence. And this time, with it being a Messenger conversation, I could see that he’d read what I’d sent him.
Anonymity is the name of the game on Gumtree
Now, I know all too well that the general public are rubbish at selling cars. It’s how the likes of you and I can actually make a living out of it, after all. But this guy took things to a new level.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the following Sunday I was out doing my weekly food shop at a well-known grocery outlet and spotted said Skoda in the car park, so I figured I’d give it one last shot.
I scribbled a note on the back of an old till receipt, explaining that I was the chap who’d messaged him via Facebook and that I was desperately keen to get my hands on his car.
Then I did my shopping while simultaneously trying to work out which of my fellow trolley-pushers was the type of person who’d own an immaculate 20-year-old Octavia vRS and be hopeless at returning phone messages.
Was it the man shopping in his pyjamas, or the one with a giant haircut that could be better described as a plumage?
I got home an hour or so later and was just running myself a bath when the phone rang.
‘Hello Mike. It’s Steve, with the Skoda,’ said a voice that was quite clearly in the pub, or if not, at least somewhere else where the football was on the telly and there were lots of folk about.
Wonders may never cease, I thought.
Keeping it friendly, I replied: ‘Thanks for calling me – I’m actually really keen to buy your car. Would that be possible?’
‘Well, actually, no,’ said Steve, a scratching, rustling noise coming from his phone suggesting that he was indeed the chap with the plumage.
‘And that’s why I’m calling you from the pub. I don’t want to sell it at all and it’s only fair that I front it up with you.
‘I bought it a few weeks ago and I love it, but my fiancée hates it and she’s told me I have to sell it. So, I keep advertising it to show willing and then deliberately ignoring inquiries.’
At least he had the decency to tell me, poor chap. I now find myself wondering which one will go first – the fiancée or the Skoda? I’ve a feeling I know which one I’d keep…
This feature appears in the current edition of Car Dealer – issue 182 – along with news, views, reviews, interviews and much more. Read and download it for FREE here.
