I recently received an offer in the mail from the dealership I lease my 2018 CX-5 Grand Touring.
Per the mail they are offering 110% of KBB value for the trade in of the 2018 CX-5. Plus $2000 towards a new vehicle. And a 2 yr/25k mile complimentary Mazda Maintenance Plan. They are touting a $0 drive off for the new vehicle. But of course in reading fine prints, $0 drive off with applicable trade in and downpayment lol.
My lease ends 11/2021 & I have about 7k left on my lease payment.
Am not really in the market for a car at this time but if I can get a good deal then I figure why not go for it…
I haven’t reached out to the dealer regarding their updgrade offer yet. I did ask for a separate quote for a 2020 CX-5 GT for 36/12K as a starting point for negotiations.
Any body have opinions on this? Good or bad? Any experience with trading in a car that still has lease payments left?
I’d appreciate any input at this time. Also what pitfalls should I look out for or avoid?
Sounds like a genetic letter all dealers send to get you back in the door. If you’re significantly under water, 110% kbb dealer trade value won’t matter much. Your negative equity still has to be paid off by you.
They send these out to everyone. Also read the fine print. It says this offer is if your car is perfect at will he adjusted based on the condition of your car l tires etc.
Find out what your pay off is and email them and get an offer in writing. I had a Mazda dealer give me an offer to buy out even though my car was worth way less. I got the offer in writing and negotiated a new car deal. When I got there they tried to tell me my car wasn’t actually worth that and to read the fine print and blah blah blah. So I walked. They stopped me and gave me the deal.
So TLDR. Can’t hurt to call or email but don’t just go to the dealer.
Early in my career I produced and mailed as many as 60,000 letters like this per month by myself, using rented mailing lists, an HP laser printer, and a Third Class mailing permit from the post office in Lake Forest, Illinois.
The grueling part was applying all of those Third Class stamps (the response rates were dramatically lower when the postage indicia were pre-printed on the envelopes).
We charged by the letter, but we only retained a client if enough people walked into the dealership waving the letter in the air, demanding to pay only {pmt_amt} per month on the {veh_yr}{veh_model}{trim} we were pushing.
So the analog equivalent of CPC vs CPMs. What was the conversion rate in those days, if you remember?
Even today, those mailers aren’t cheap. My understanding is they still work, especially as you slide closer to subprime. I also understand that you can target the demographics like online ads, and remarket to your past customers is the lazy fire hose.
I don’t recall, but it was a small company and it wasn’t very scientific.
Our clients were mostly long-term, so if a GM was frustrated one month we’d dump a few thousand extra pieces for just the cost of the postage.
At the time we were getting $0.70/letter plus postage.
These were 8.5 x 11 personalized laser-printed letters on dealership letterhead, in a sealed #10 envelope with the consumer’s name printed on the outside (window envelopes were a bigger kiss of death than pre-printed postage indicia).
For an additional fee I would hand-sign every letter individually. Some nights I would go home from work and my right wrist was so sore I couldn’t… distract myself from the loneliness of being single.
Forgive me for the esoteric anecdote, but often the mailing lists we used had the target recipient’s name all in one field (“Smith, John R.”).
In order to do a salutation like “Dear Mr. Smith,” I had to parse the full name field and dump each constituent piece into separate columns in the database, and then use software to interpret the gender in order to assign the appropriate title of respect [Mr., Ms., etc.]).
I mailed a lot of letters to “Mr. Beaver C. Crafty” before I realized that I was actually targeting this company.
