Pardon my ignorance, but what part of the language in the notice would make this apply to a financed car? The word “Retail”? If someone financed a car, then it’s theirs to sell for however much they want as long as they pay off the balance of their loan, right? As a practical matter, why would BMW care who is buying the car? It’s not like they can inflate the loan balance for a third party dealer buyout. It’s quite different than a buyout of a lease, I think.
That’s what made me think it is also for sales if financed through BMW FS.
I definitely don’t claim to be the expert on the matter but wanted to share as much info as I had 
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Dude I know!
Bubble guts all weekend lol
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If this is the case for financed cars then it’s like when you sell you house the bank says your loan balance is “market rate”.
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In what way? The loan balance is the loan balance. Sales tax has already been paid. You need to pay off the lien obviously but you can sell the car you own to anyone.
Having a dealer pay off FS directly was only beneficial to lessees because that method avoided sales tax on the buyout.
No one should even call FS for a financed car except to pay off the lien and pay for expedited title if they want to.
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The language on the notice made me think BMW did this on the request of their dealer network. My guess is that dealers complained about lack of new car allocation and BMW ( not being able to increase production easily ) offered this as an alternative solution: “Hey dealers , we won’t be able to give you more new cars but we have a solution for you to get a lot more used bmws”
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Because cancelling customer orders to reprice them wasn’t enough for some dealers in June…
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Don’t know about that but if I owned a dealer and I did not hit my forecast / plan for the quarter, I would want to know why . If the answer from GM was “ we didn’t have enough cars to sell “, I would make sure BMW NA would know about it .
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Now, I’m less inclined to payoff my car for $70K, in order to sell it to a third party dealer.
The industry has to do what it needs to do to stay afloat I guess.
If im a dealer or captive this is great news
So much harder to project incoming cars/used car sales when folks are unloading to 3rd party sites
Used cars are a huge revenue stream for dealers
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So what’s the consensus now , call around to various BMW dealers to see who’s willing to play ball ? I assume we’re still allowed to sell to BMW dealers ?
Do you think that BMW dealers will take this as a way to lower valuations for vehicles since they only have to compete with customer lease payoffs?
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Why wouldn’t they?
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Did you have any equity even before this happened?
Yes , 4-5k based on offers from vroom, carmax etc.
Absolutely! This is why I unloaded my Chevy Bolt yesterday. GMF has this same policy kicking in on 7/1.
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Just called BMWFS this morning and confirmed this. It is still possible to sell to a 3rd party as long as the lessee calls BMWFS to request the payoff quote.
Suggest to change the thread title to clarify cc: @jeisensc
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Do we know if they are raising cost of 3rd party buyouts, ala Audi?
I assume not. The rep told the only changed is that the leasee needs to call to get the quote instead of the 3rd party. I’m heading to Carmax today so we will find out soon.
I’m not so confident in that. I am waiting for GMTV to cut a check to BMWFS and called BMWFS today where they confirmed that given my third party payoff was requested prior to Friday that the payment just had to be made prior the expiration date as stated in that quote. To be fair I was just relieved that I should be all set so I didn’t press for more info but it did sound like Friday June 25th had some significance. I hope you’re right though that they are just making it more complicated and not stopping it entirely…