Questions about transferring my BMW lease

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1

Hi guys, I have a 7-month-old BMW lease that I’d like to get rid of, what’s your suggestions?

Model: 2016 X1 xDrive28i
MSRP: 44045
Monthly Payment w/Tax: 348.56
Location: SoCal

I believe my payment is below market average, but really I have zero lease transfer experience. I have a couple of questions:

  1. I’m not looking to make money and only trying to get rid of the lease, how likely is that given my rather low monthly payment? Any website that you recommend?
  2. What’s the process like and how long does it take? What will happen with my 7 MSDs?
  3. Expecting to buy a home soon, how long doe it take for it to disappear on my credit report?

TIA.

2

I recently transferred the lease on my BMW. I used Craigslist to find someone to take it over. My monthly payment was a little bit higher than yours for a slightly lower MSRP.

The process with BMW was quite straightforward and faster than I expected… start to finish, everything was completed within 8 business days.

3

Thanks! Did you pay anything out of pocket at all? And how much does the buyer expect to pay in terms of transfer fee and etc.?

4

  1. Swapalease (costs $100-300) or Leasetrader. People that go there are expecting to take over a lease so they usually search for BMW (or even BMW X1) and then sort by monthly payment. Try to get to the top of the list obviously but you should be OK. Some people have to put incentives to lower the “effective” monthly to get up on the list. You can do the search yourself and see where your car would be if you spent the money

  2. The MSD will go to the new person. So you will want to try to recover that from the person you are transferring it to. While this is normal, this may present a challenge to some people so there will be less people that can take this over but you really only need 1 person to take your deal. The MSD will have to be paid to you directly AFAIK.

  3. It will show up on your credit report for a while. It will show as “CLOSED”. This will depend on how often BMWFS reports to the credit companies. I would think it should be at least every month. If you are really concerned, once the lease transfer finishes, you can have the credit bureau do “research” which means they will call BMWFS and they can mark it as CLOSED faster. Credit reports for buying houses are “negotiations” (aka you can explain things to your mortgage broker) so it is not just let me pull your credit report and it is “as-is”. You can explain that you already transferred your lease so by the time the loan closes (30-45 days), your front-end and back-end ratios will be better as this open line of credit will be gone

5

I didn’t pay anything at all. The buyer paid $500 to BMW for the transfer.

6

Thanks, how did you get your MSDs back?

7

Thanks a lot for the detailed information. I guess I’ll use craigslist as @Karrph mentioned so that there’s no cost, if it doesn’t work out I’ll try swapalease.