I’m considering leasing one of the below off SAL. I’ve also PM’d one of the private lease transfers on this forum separately. To caveat, I’m new to the U.S. and as a result, I don’t have sufficient credit to lease a new car for either of these, and so I’d have to pre-pay the remainder of the lease payments up-front when assuming the leases.
Lease 1: 2017 AMG GT S (I noticed this has been up for months, as I’ve been checking SAL for some time now)
Lease 2: 2018 C63 AMG S (I also noticed this has been up for some time)
Are these leases worth pursuing?
The issue I presume I’ll have, even with pre-paying, is I’ll still have to run a credit application through Mercedes.
you need credit approval like you said, on these cars with no credit they aren’t going to let the cars go, these are "flagship models, " you are better off building credit by buying a used one or leasing something less expensive and working your way up the chain.
Thanks Makavali. I’m finding the experience of leasing in this country really frustrating here for someone who has limited but excellent credit (~4 months, excellent) and is prepared to pay the entire thing up-front!
4 months is a drop in the bucket. Even if you pay up front they need to make sure you have credit. From what I have seen it seems that the credit requirements for lease transfers are even more stringent than leasing from the dealership.
Since you have money to burn I think Mercedes has a subscription plan. Maybe credit is less of an issue with that.
Haha… yep the insurance is probably going to do it for me. I’m from Australia - cars there are almost double the cost of cars here in the U.S. so my frame of reference is already skewed
lease something that is transferable for a year and let it build your credit, or buy something cpo that holds value well like a porsche and flip it in a year.
If you can wait it out another couple of months you should then have a FICO auto score and that will help immensely when it comes to leasing here.
We moved from the UK (via Canada) and used the Amex trick to establish credit here very quickly which was helpful but we still had to ‘enjoy’ the use of Hertz for 6 months or so before our FICO auto scores were created and we were able to lease.
