What is the most effective way to negotiate a good deal?
When starting a discussion with a dealer, is it best to reveal that you will be leasing the vehicle or do you negotiate as if you’re buying the car cash and once you and the dealer agree on a price then bring up the lease option?
How to negotiate is an art most posts just show us possible deals.
I do know that telling dealers you’re paying with cash won’t affect anything, and possibly make it worse because banks give them incentives to finance/lease.
Sometimes I ask for x sale price, get a decent lease with all details and review line by line and tell them I’ll go this weekend if the get x price etc. sometimes I show an advertisement and work down from there.
However I email LOTS of dealers with the exact stock# I’m interested in.
Thanks for the tips @Warbeast… How do you choose the sale price? Is it a low ball price to get dealers to give you their lowest pricing or is it a price that you believe is fair and happy to pay?
Also, how can I find the exact stock number?
I just tell them what I’m willing to pay (monthly with tax) with zero drive off…let the dealer figure out how to get there!
FYI, I always lowball (about 10% less than what I see others getting the car for), but not unreasonably so.
In looking for a volt you’d waste your time negotiating a purchase price and then do a lease, more incentives available to dealer for purchase than lease (i.e. when I was searching dealers would quote me a sale price and then realize when I was looking to lease that it wasn’t available for that)
I told dealers, I’m not negotiating down payment, I’m not negotiating monthly payment. I’m assuming these standard incentives are available to be applied to cap cost reductions. I’m assuming the MF is the standard money factor. If you try to mark it up, i’ll walk out. I know that higher mileage results in a lower residual and therefore higher payments. I’m negotiating one number, the sale price listed for the car that any cap cost reductions will subtract from. Every other number we arrive at will flow from that one number.
Do you use TrueCar to figure out what others are paying?
I like that approach. Seems very simple and doesn’t leave any room for any surprises. With this approach I suppose I need to understand all the available incentives that are applicable to me. What’s the best site that has a comprehensive list of all incentives from your experience?
truecar doesn’t really show you lease incentives, its really focused on purchasing (and it will show purchase incentives from time to time, but those just increase the “savings” number it shows you.
my approach only works once you know exactly what you want, to get that to that point, you have to talk to a number of dealers. i.e. eve if I didn’t have this site, I would have figured out pretty quickly that every dealer in california had 7150 in CCR incentives on the volt and one could go higher depending on loyalty/capture/farm/military… type incentives.
if one can’t find the info out here or on edmunds what lease incentives are available for the car you want, it would require some legwork to visit dealers, sit down aith a quote and say you want to sleep on it and not be bullied into a sale. (i.e. “this is only good today”, ok, but at least you know the structure even if you miss out on the deal, also might really only be true at the end of the month)
Rebates and incentives are not always the same for leasing, so you’re probably wasting time negotiating beforehand.
As some others have pointed out here. Some manufacturers vary greatly between purchase and lease incentives (i.e. Chevy) while others do not (i.e. Mercedes Benz). Know which one does and which ones does not. Either way a safe bet to negotiate with any manufacturer is to negotiate the sales price prior to any incentives. I always tell the dealer to do that and add the incentives I qualify for later. Some get that and some that are trained to sell on payment do not. Just be plain, courteous and to the point you will eventually find someone that is the same.
Truecar is a terrible system IMO (and I say that as a consumer, not a broker)
Dealers self report to TrueCar on pricing so it’s easy to manipulate.
To answer your question from the title - yes you should be upfront. It’s just wasting time if you lie to them or withhold information.
You gain nothing from being dishonest. If a store doesn’t want to discount a lease - find another store.
Really? I thought TrueCar gets real numbers from some official source. What is the incentive for dealers to even provide these numbers to TrueCar because TrueCar will send them clients anyway in order to survive?
In my experience, pitting dealers against each other has worked the best. For both of my previous leases, I negotiated hard with one dealer for 1-2 hours, trying to get them to their lowest offer, and then immediately after I leave I call up another dealership saying " can you beat XXX on this vehicle…" So far I’ve had decent success.
So Truecar allows dealers to set their own price for vehicles - however, they also can play w/ the numbers when they report back to TC.
They can show trade value against a vehicle to skew the ‘lowest’ price they show.
When you take that printout in - Truecar gets cut a check (that’s changed recently) for sending a ‘lead’.
The incentive is more sales - some stores need deals just to keep the lights on.
Yeah, I understand how they can manipulate prices, but don’t understand why they would even bother sending this data to TrueCar. They get leads, sure but seems like more work for them