Hi Everyone,
Just thought I’d share my Vroom and Carvana experience. I didn’t end up selling the vehicle to either of them but I still thought the process and the way things played out was kind of interesting (at least to me lol)
I had wanted to lease a larger SUV than my 2018 BMW X1 (the X3 in particular), but had ten months left on my lease so wasn’t optimistic that things could work out this early. The few times along the way that I had researched values for the X1 they were not encouraging. The payoff was around $28,300.00, and even though the X1 had extremely low miles most of the KBB type sites showed values in the very low twenties at best. For info sake they now show mid $20’s since the used car market has improved. I will say up front I did NOT want to deal with selling it myself or do a lease transfer.
Around the end of June I figured I’d check Vroom. They came in at $24700.00. So too low to help but still higher than I expected. Then a week later they came back (on their own) with an offer of $25200.00. Still not enough. The BMW dealer played with the figures (trade value vs payoff vs rolling in the remaining payments etc) and the best they could do was about $27K even. I was surprised they got anywhere near the payoff but the deal still didn’t work out, mainly because of my credit and BMW Financial wanting to cap the payment.
At the end of July I figured I’d make one more attempt at putting a deal together, since I still thought the negative equity might be hurting things more than my credit…or at least making an already challenging situation worse. The Mercedes dealer I was now working with (on a GLC) was able to get a lease approved without restrictions more readily than BMW, but unfortunately they were coming in a few thousand less on the trade payoff. So this time I tried Carvana instead of Vroom to see what kind of figure they would offer, and they came in at $27860.00. So roughly $400 less than the payoff, which I thought was pretty unbelievable. I was fully prepared to sell the X1 to Carvana at that point, but when I told the Mercedes dealer about Carvana’s offer they decided to match the Carvana figure…which helped everything else work out on the GLC lease and made the whole transaction a lot more convenient. I haven’t seen too many other Carvana and Vroom-related posts (or really any) mention the dealer matching their numbers so I wanted to share that part, since I think sometimes people just figure the dealer won’t even bother trying to get close to what Carvana and Vroom can do.