I have been monitoring my credit, and haven’t been hit with a hard inquiry so that at least is not another negative with this experience.
1 Like
Here goes another car sales “game changer”, after Truecar. This is the fate of any really consumer oriented car sales business.
My experience with Honcker mirrors those of previous posters. After I placed an order, the dealer called me a few hours later to inform me it couldn’t be honored, and that it would be $30/month more. They cited an issue with Honcker’s algorithm. I ended up negotiating with the dealer to get it lower, but it was still more than the original quote.
For me, Honcker was most useful as a pricing tool to discover deals that are within the realm of possibility. The MX-5 generally leases poorly, but by browsing Honcker, I found out that good leases on that car were possible that month.
I did feel some buyer’s remorse after I got the car and shared my deal – when y’all went out and hacked MX-5 deals that were $1,000 to $2,000 less than mine. 
7 Likes
Kind of like the student teaching the teacher. You should be proud.
When I put the numbers in for the car I “ordered” in the calculator before hitting the button, it was 9% off MSRP before incentives so it looked like a good deal.
The dealer didn’t call me, I got a call from a New York number and it was the Honcker rep telling me the car would be $506 instead of $387.
So instead of 9% under MSRP, the price would be 2% over MSRP and a payment 31% more than I was quoting.
Honestly, the part that irks me the most is that Honcker is still listing the car in my market for the lower price which is just completely unethical. I’m going to have to get into angry old man mode and write a bunch of reviews and letters.
3 Likes
They’ll just have to adjust their model just like TrueCar did to bend to dealership lobby will and become just another funnel to feed the machine.
Prices will be higher but they still will have customers - those who loathe going to the dealership and possibly won’t even use a broker. They still just want to click and get the car delivered even at the average price at best.
TrueCar isn’t very helpful for hacking either but still exists and has customers.
Same will be with Honcker - average lease prices but streamlined proces from the comfort of your home.
2 Likes
Completely agree, but Honker needs to clean their act ASAP, before they completely ruin any remaining credibility that they have built so far.
I think that an app like Honcker makes sense when you look at it from the creator’s and initial investors mindset. They probably don’t really care one way or another if it “works” as intended. They know that the odds of “disrupting the car buying process” are pretty low. But what they can do is create and market an app that works just well enough to get people interested, including the big boys like AutoNation, DealTime, etc. Getting acquired is the end game here. Those VC funds won’t last forever.
They re-listed the car that I ordered (same ID number) back on their platform at the exact same price that they couldn’t even come close to.
That’s just unethical.
1 Like
I got 4 calls last week asking me to honor Honcker’s pricing on a qx60 pure. When I logged into the app, I noticed that the 12k mileage option was cheaper than the 10k option, which was the first sign that something was off. One of the guys I spoke to put in an app just to see what would happen. They got back to him with a price that was over $100 / month higher. Honcker feels like an app that allows dealers to do a bait and switch.
1 Like
Anyone care to forward these concerns to IAC which invested $23MM — I’m sure the employee who went to bat for Honker is sweating a bit.
This bait and switch is the antithesis of transparency. What’s the point of a soft pull then?
Honestly, it seems like they’ve effectively been ‘acquired’ with their latest 2018 series A of $26M by IAC.
IAC has a huge portfolio of ‘marketplace’ Internet companies around the world (Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, and their foreign copies) as well as a large portfolio of online dating companies.
I doubt they’ll be seeking external funding at this point.
However, dealers will need to actually convert some of the deals sent to them through Honcker, otherwise they’ll delete their inventory from the platform and stop paying.
I’m sure that some of the $20 higher monthly payment deals are getting signed, but I’d be curious as to what percentage of them.
2 Likes
IAC runs Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor, which are pretty much the home improvement equivalent of bullshit lead generation engines.
1 Like
The soft pull is to gather your valuable user data.
I just got off the phone with a Honcker rep who accused me of feeding him bad information about a price point I had for a different car.
To add insult to injury, just after I got off the phone with him the Honcker app sent a flash sale notification with a special price of $316 for the car I ordered that was originally listed at $324, but that they couldn’t get me for cheaper than $424.
The rep said they put the new price that local dealers would do into an Excel sheet, and that since the tech team wasn’t in they couldn’t update them today.
So instead of a high tech company with dynamic pricing, this is a bunch of folks on the phone calling local dealers thousands of miles away plugging numbers into an Excel that gets manually updated. Company was totally worth pumping $26M into at whatever ridiculous valuation they raised at.
3 Likes
so they finally explained to me the price discrepancy. Their pricing model incorporates every incentive out there to get that price (even ones you are not eligible for). The easiest way for them to fix this is just put starting at their price vs saying that’s the price.
That’s not the real reason, and everybody hears some different story as to why they can’t meet the made up prices they plug into their app.
For the car I was looking to buy, the price difference between the Honcker app and the reality once they called me was $100 more. There were no issues with incentives, they just made up a price.
The solution is for them to stop the bait and switch and just get real prices from dealers. They claim to be a marketplace in their own marketing materials, but they are posting made up numbers that their ‘dealer partners’ aren’t able to meet.
What is going on with Honkers, every car is at least 2-3k more expensive for the term of the lease , compared to the prices they had during last week of Feb.
Now they added make an offer , which means it back to old school car buying.
1 Like
Make an offer seems to have broken Honcker. Just before this “feature” the car I was looking into (now ready to lease) was at the lowest I have seen it. This was in March. When make an offer showed up the price went up $40/month and is now above my better local deals.
I placed Make an offer on 2 different cars with slightly different lease rates (same MSRP) so I imagine they are from different dealers. Did this yesterday morning. Still waiting for a reply on either one. Doesn’t bode well for a quick and painless process. I offered the exact number that was on Honclker before the make an offer option was available.
Or maybe they fixed the glitch causing the price to be 40/less than it should’ve been to begin with.
Just posted on another thread but I made an offer on 2 cars presumably different dealers for the exact price that was listed before make an offer popped up. 24 hrs later still waiting to hear from either one?