New to this site and find all of the topics including the lease calculator and associated insight from everyone to be really interesting. I’m curious to get your feedback about BMW and Mercedes as lenders based on an experience I just had…
I was in a 2018 BMW X1 lease and had the itch to upgrade to an X3. Still had about 10 payments left so I knew it would be a challenge. At the end of June I contacted the BMW dealership I leased from in VA but they were less than responsive. Contacted and then went to a different dealer in VA and they pulled out all the stops to try to make a deal including getting pretty close to my payoff on the X1. But then BMW Financial basically said that because of my less than perfect credit/credit score (but always perfect on the car side of things so never had a problem getting what I wanted before) they would cap the payment to what I was currently paying for the X1 and wouldn’t budge. Meaning no deal on an X3.
Fast forward to a month later. I’m a glutton for punishment lol so I applied to Mercedes Financial for a Mercedes GLC lease. Initially denied but then dealer said he could get me approved on a GLC loaner because they were able to discount it so heavily and that would make the terms look more attractive to MB Financial. For info sake the Mercedes dealer was much less generous on my X1 trade than BMW but again they could still get me approved through MB Financial on the loaner. I didn’t want the loaner so the deal stalled. But then I decided to get a quote from Carvana on my X1, which was within $460 of the payoff…and asked the Mercedes dealer if my X1 was no longer an issue could I get approved on the new no miles GLC that I wanted. Within ten minutes they wrote back and said that they could basically come to my terms (more or less) on the new GLC w no miles and match Carvana’s offer on the X1. So a couple day later I signed for a new 2020 GLC.
So BMW Financial (with whom I had a perfect payment record for the couple years I had the X1) wouldn’t approve an X3 (because again they wouldn’t approve a higher payment than I had on the X1) but Mercedes Financial would approve a $53K GLC with a significantly higher payment than I had on the BMW? Have any of you experienced anything like this? I know that anything involving credit and loans is a bit of a game, but this really didn’t make much sense to me and it made me start wondering if BMW had changed something with their approval parameters or if Mercedes had loosened theirs. In the end I’m happy with how things ended up but still kind of puzzled about how BMW Financial handled things this time around…
Your question is very subjective. There is no one size fits all to these types of scenarios. Your experience with MBFS this time was a lot more positive than it was with BMWFS. Others might say the opposite. Maybe it’s how the respective dealers handled your personal situation. I have lease accounts with both and can’t say one is better or worse than the other.
Without any specifics (and please don’t get into them), sometimes under the right circumstances a dealership can push to get an approval, but it depends why it was declined in the first place (score? DTI? Income and it’s documentation?).
If you don’t want to be in that situation again, focus on getting your credit score up for next time.
Appreciate the feedback. I realize my question doesn’t have the perfect answer. But I’ve leased probably ten cars from a variety of manufacturers and this was the first time things didn’t work out. And for them not to work out with BMW and then work out with Mercedes was a surprise to me…
True. But my credit/credit score never stopped a car deal from happening before this occasion with BMW. And for it to then work out a month later with Mercedes made me wonder what was going on w BMW. But I will work to get the score back up so the terms can improve next time. For now I’m enjoying my new GLC.
I guess I meant in the final outcome I had never before experienced a situation where I didn’t end up being able to lease what I wanted. It’s certainly possible that there have been other times where some behind the scenes arm twisting was necessary, but I never heard about it if there was. Either way like you said it seems like Mercedes was able to pull strings more successfully than BMW was in order to get a deal done.
BMWFS is easily the best bank in the game for a long list of reasons.
MBFS was okay-- but after what they’ve done with lease transfers at the last moment in the middle of a global pandemic----never again.
Thanks for your feedback. Everything went very well with BMW Financial when I leased the BMW X1 through them. It also went well during the lease, and even after the lease when I called (today actually) to get a piece of documentation in regards to the lease being paid off by the MB dealer. I would have been happy to stay w BMW and move up the ladder to an X3 so I was disappointed that things didn’t work out. I understand that there can be all kinds of variables when it comes to loans and credit, but was surprised that MB Financial was willing to do something that BMW Financial wouldn’t if that makes sense. Happy to end up with my first Mercedes though.
It sounds like the Mercedes dealer had a FI manager who could ask for a favor while the FI manager at BMW did not. One of the reasons why having a seasoned FI manager is extremely important at the dealer level.
Exactly. When I was at Toyota, if a customer was credit challenged, he had to go to Charlie. Charlie would get anyone approved with Toyota Financial Services. 490 credit score, but you always payed Toyota on time? No problem, Tier 1 or 2 rates if you were with Charlie. God forbid someone else tried to sign you up and it would be an auto decline.
It does seem that way, and I agree. But I also wonder if it may have been (as Falcon01 mentioned) a situation where BMW Financial didn’t have the “right” person around to help make things happen, so the dealer could have done their best and it still didn’t matter…
Good point. I was in the car business for many years before I escaped and found a better (for me) line of work. So my surprise regarding the way things played out isn’t just coming from the perspective of a customer but as someone who used to deal with this type of scenario for a living.
