Car brands with positive equity at lease end?

What car brands typically have positive equity so you make money by selling it to Carmax at lease end for profit? From my experience, Porsche is pretty good at this. I’ve also heard Range Rover was good too a couple of years ago but not sure if it’s still the case now.

Not BMW. Feel like it happens mostly for SUVs- grand Cherokee, pilot, mdx, rdx for some possible examples

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This doesn’t really make sense. Having positive equity usually means that you paid too much depreciation in advance.

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What’s the point? Shouldn’t have leased it to begin with if resale IRL > RV

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You need either exceptional resale value or low residual with low mf. Porsche as you mentioned, but I don’t think their suv’s or Panamera would work, 911, cayman or boxster maybe. Especially the gts models. Wrx sti maybe. The chargers do pretty well. But the other half is low residual which means you are paying for that equity anyway.

I’m thinking the 2019 Corvettes could be an option.

I made money on Porsche Macan and Panamera before at lease end.

Made money? Doubt it. How much did you put down and what were your monthly payments?

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I recently checked the value on my 2018 Jeep GC and Im 1 year into the lease. If i sold it to Carvana now, Id be over $1000 ahead (haven’t checked the other services like Vroom, et al). And my deal was $320/month with $328 DAS, $40k MSRP, 36/12, so im not over paying.

I think part of it is bc its a harder to find trim/color (Upland in Rhino), so the local market value is high.

why would anyone want to have positive equity in their lease?

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If you were shopping two cars that were $300 per month, would you want the one with a chance of $2000 of equity at the end, or the one with no chance of equity?

i would want the one with no chance of equity because that means i’m getting a better value and sticking the lender with a car that isn’t worth anything near what their residual value is.

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The fact that a car depreciates horribly doesn’t make it a good value or a good car.

Honestly any brand that leases shitty due to dumped residuals on cars that resell well.

If I’m understanding this correctly though you’d rather overpay on a lease and use it as a savings account (a risky one because any number of things can happen to your car) similarly to people who rely on a tax refund (because you overpaid through your withholdings)

Tesla comes to mind.

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Why stop there? Call your financial planner and tell them you are opening a Christmas club account.

OP you are asking us to tell you what stock will increase the most in 3 years: nobody here has a crystal ball.

Accords don’t lease particularly well (RV unreasonably low) which is why certain trims are better to buy.

But to say that (for instance) in 2021 a year into your lease that Porsche won’t start dumping Macans for $449 on a sign and drive and tank black book value, nobody here knows. It’s only “worth more” if the buyout is less than you can sell/trade it for, which (as has been said) means you overpaid for the utility you used.

Mods: lock it up

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I’ll give you a concrete example. I leased an Accord and an Altima, both for about $200 per month. The Accord had about $2,000 of equity at the end - the Altima had no equity. Consumers seem to buy/lease both cars at a similar rate and they are similar in many ways. So why wouldn’t you choose to lease the Accord, if you are indifferent to driving an Accord or Altima? Sure you ‘overpaid’ by $50 per month on the Accord, but that is the point. The worst case scenario is you get a car for $200 per month, best case it is $150. If the possibility of $2,000 doesn’t matter to you, and you like the Altima marginally more, the go lease an Altima instead.

What if I dislike both?

You could predict that the Accord was going to have equity? The only way is if the RV is set low, which would usually make it a bad lease.

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You mean hypothetical? Or did you lease both cars on the same day for the same terms?

The take rate has 0 influence on this example (correlation != causation), but continue.

Also not how it works: time cost of money, discounted cash flow, your payments were “taxed”’with rent, but go on:

Question about this concrete example:

  1. Have you been a Used Car manager at a Volume Honda store for 3+ years at lease inception? If not
  2. Were you an Auction specialist at Manheim working the lanes for 3+ years at lease inception?
  3. Did you shop the exact same model Accord for an entire year to trend out the changes in residual and money factor? Also holding US interest rates constant for the observation year until lease inception?

You concrete example falls apart for many many reasons, here are several:

  • interest rates / money factors change in the macro economy
  • portfolio managers at Honda FS decide every month what their target number of leases in each credit tier is and adjust accordingly. If the portolio is overstuffed with A-tier and the rates are the same, they can bump the rates on the 1st to disincentivize leasing and push people (except business leasers who can’t get their write off any other way) to finance
  • if production volumes change, that affects supply and availability, and again in 36 months. All these X1s on stop sale won’t be coming back in Feb/Mar/Apr/May 2022 because they didn’t get leased three years prior.

Those are just a few uncontrollable/invisible variables that affect the deal at inception. Now at disposition:

  • how stable is black book? This is affected by availability of CPO-able used cars, traded or lease grounded
  • for how long have trade in/resale values been stable? Today they are inflated by low supply of recent used AND Carvana/Vroom overpaying for cars. That is new and won’t last forever. This changes every minute of every day.
  • where in the product refresh cycle is your Accord? Are new Accords? If your body style was 2 years old at inception and Honda introduces a refresh a month prior to disposition, that affects your resale value.

Now things you could but can’t control:

  • was your “good enough” accord in any kind of accident to impair its resale value? Curb rash? Parking lot dings?
  • how much time are you willing to spend at/prior to disposition shopping to get “the best” resale?

Last:

  • the house almost always wins. By all means, if you come out ahead, great. The people who price risk at Honda FS have all the financials, stable interest rates for 60-90 days, lease portfolio visibility and kpis, internal product roadmaps for unannounced/upcoming refresh cycles, actuals on lease dispositions back to epoch, auction reports, all in data warehouses, and available to more actuaries than there are active users on leasehackr. The manufacturers too small to have that secret sauce for themselves use Chase, BofA, and US Bank as their lease captives, and they buy access to the information they don’t have in-house.

Anyone who isn’t looking at all that decision support data is guessing, and anyone who does is EDUCATED guessing because we don’t have time machines to see what black book on a 2019 Accord will be in Oct 2022. :man_shrugging:t2:

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