While I appreciate the spirit of what the OP is saying here, I feel that asking for their “best lease price” is just too vague for a proper response. You need to be extremely specific, because that will weed out the time wasters, since they will never give you that specific information if they are looking to obfuscate things or pull a bait and switch.
There’s a story about the band Van Halen causing thousands of dollars worth of damage backstage at a concert because there were brown M&M’s left inside a bowl of candy in the dressing room. What really happened was that they put the request for no brown M&M’s in their contracts so they knew whether or not the promoters were paying attention to the important stuff in the contract too. What happened in this case was the promoters took improper measures because they didn’t read the stage specs carefully, and the floor of the area sustained thousands of dollars worth of damage. The reason I tell this story is that if I send a request specifically asking for a sales manager to email me with the current selling price before any rebates and incentives are applied on a specific vehicle, and I get phone calls about test drives and prices including rebates, I know I’m probably not getting a good deal over there.
The next sentence is “I would like the monthly payment based on a $0 drive-off”. How is that vague?
Most of the dealers came back with a deal sheet and the RV/MF hand-written on it. In contrast, when trying to negotiate sales price separately it would usually take 3-4 round trips before ever getting a reasonable deal sheet.
Fair enough, but again, in my opinion it leaves too much wiggle room for shenanigans. That may or may not happen, but an agreed upon selling price before rebates eliminates all that, since the rest is just basic math. I think you are onto something good here, and while it’s certainly not vague for “Us”, there’s a small opening there for the dealer to say “Plus tax, tags, fees, etc etc” when you go to seal the deal. They could always feign ignorance, or legitimately misunderstand, thinking that you are referring to zero cash cap cost reduction and not a true zero drive off. Just my two cents.
I just wanted to add a few thoughts on negotiating before and after incentives. I’ve been helping a friend find a lease on a Honda. There’s only one incentive, $1000 lease cash. So far I’ve tried negotiating with at least three dealers before incentives and each time they have said “Yes, your monthly will be XXX”, and when I run the numbers without fail they clearly included the $1000 in the dealer discount. IMHO it’s way too easy for dealers to “misunderstand” what “before incentives” means, probably because it makes their “discount” look smaller.
Sometimes I have to adapt if they keep including the incentive especially if it is just one. Just push everyone for their biggest discount and include the incentive in already.
Yes, agree. The sales people arent there to do math. Even if they know how, the numbers flow from sales manager, so they arent empowered to do anything other than present what they are told. With my latest lease, I had the best success cutting to the chase, by leveraging the discount on my best offer and doing the math for the dealer on a lease, seeing if they could get to that monthly. Fairly quickly it was evident whether they could/would do it or not.
This is Kia to a T when it comes to the Stinger. I’ve talked to a bunch of dealers, asking for “dealer discount” and they invariably include lease cash / cash back incentives. When I subtract all those, some aren’t offering ANYTHING or maybe $300 off MSRP as the true “dealer discount”.
I saw one guy on Facebook claiming he’s paying $738 / month on a Stinger!!
I’m curious here, when discussing pricing before inventives, where is the wiggle room coming from? Just the dealer and how nice they’re feeling?
Like I guess if a car is $50k MSRP, but then the dealer says they’ll do $45k before inventives, what’s your basis for going back and saying “give me a better deal” or “no I want $41k”?
I’m especially curious how to handle this in a scenario where you might have $4k in incentives to be applied, so it’s like you’re saying give me $4k and then I’m taking off my $4k from that. I get that the inventives might not cost the dealer anything (is that right??) but it still seems weird.
It’s coming out of their profit, so it’s whether selling the car at the lower price is worth it to them.
I’m not sure what you mean by the “basis”. But usually each car has a discount before incentives as a percentage of the MSRP that is a target. This varies between manufacturers, models, and model years, but you can often get a good feeling for these on this forum.
For example, I got a 14% discount on my deal. I knew that was actually low compared to some people on this forum (who I all think are in southern California), but I knew from asking a lot of dealerships in this area that it was a decent deal.
You are entitled to incentives. In most cases, incentives don’t cost the dealer anything. That’s why they are manufacturer incentives. You would be asking for the dealership to give you $4K before the manufacturer gave you $4K, for a total of $8K.
Fantastic post which describes the actual process as many dealer won’t respond to mass email RFQs.
Your deal is very close to the one I got a year ago which is not bad considering the rising interest rates and additional mileage (12k v. 10k for me). But of course mine was new - for a used car aka loaner I would want 20% discount off MSRP.
Enjoy your Benz - I find it is as fun to drive as my old BMW.
I think the benefit of your email works both ways. I am sure sales people like working with customers who understand leasing as well. It would be annoying to explain how they got to certain numbers with people who just dont understand leasing.
