@RustyDaemon, if you’d like to speak to the dev ^^^ hah.
Hey, first congrats on shipping. Second, great job and tool.
I don’t know how many people try to work around brokers, and of those how many people actually get the deal. I imagine it’s not that many. Maybe those special vehicles will be easier to find but I imagine brokers have the good relationship with their dealer to prevent that.
I think this fits exactly the mission of lh, for those that want to try their hand at hacking their own deal. One of the hardest things to do is to find the vehicle.
It’s also helpful if you have a deal on the works and you can see how much inventory is available for that exact build.
I think the suggestion above to only display the options available from the prior broad result is a good idea. It only works when you start broad but it’s a good way to help filter without having to try every option combination.
Im a bit old school myself so the hunt is the most exciting part. Cargurus was built for exactly that.
We do have a great relationship with the dealers we represent but it doesn’t stop people from going around us. We promise a specific amount of cars in exchange for pricing that allows our clients to not have to haggle. One issue is that yes the dealer will sell you the car in many cases for what a broker has advertised, because at the end of the day they have to move cars…and they have the discount factored in their numbers for the month. The broker is then left without a fee for his/her hard work…and did you truly hunt? Or did you regurgitate someone else’s hard work in an attempt to secure a deal. Personally I love seeing someone get a good deal, brokers are just here to make that process the time, effort easy for a few.
I can easily say 98% of deals done without a broker, involved looking at broker deals and copying and pasting.
4 Likes
I think for me, the hunt was more about finding a dealer that would actually would deal more-so than it was finding an acceptable car, it was more like “okay, I’ve found 3 or 4 I know I’d get today” and then you go one by one seeing who would play ball and chisel away at the deal. This is partially why I think any tool doesn’t really change who would pay a broker or not. I think some people see the value and understand its a service and pay, and some people don’t.
Like I said, I don’t think this is giving any information that isn’t available elsewhere, if anything, it’s maybe making it so you don’t need to search like, cars.com and cargurus.com, maybe it’s just on search. I can also tell you tho that for whatever reason, this system doesn’t have everything either.
This is really cool and it honestly doesn’t let me do anything I couldn’t already do using BMW’s own website, this just staves me a couple steps.
With that said, I can absolutely see it as something that can be used to pull a deal out from under a broker, especially on very niche vehicles or configurations. Not that you couldn’t have done that before, it’s just even less effort now.
-Andrew
2 Likes
Lmao are you serious
2 Likes
100% percent serious…in fact it’s common for most trusted hackers to say “look at shared deals, or check brokers to see what’s possible”
2 Likes
All I have to do is copy and paste deals to get them? Wow, I’ve been doing this all wrong…
4 Likes
My friend when you were chasing down your volvo what was your target discount?
2 Likes
It was 12%, which did not come from a broker listing.
No never said it did but if you have ever gazed upon a broker listing…give you a pretty good target wouldn’t you say?
4 Likes
I’ll disagree with this statement. If I build a MSport 330i with the Dynamic Handling Package on the BMWUSA website, it says there are “no exact matches” and then spits out five different cars of varying “closeness” based on how many options matched at only my closest dealer. There’s no way to tell the website “show me any 3 series with the dynamic handling package within 100 miles of me” like this tool does.
1 Like
You can absolutely get that information out of the website, even though the way I was going about it was somewhat cumbersome. They are able to cache that same information because it’s already out there, they’re just aggregating it for you and giving you different ways to slice the data.
Which is why I’m not surprised that this didn’t take a whole lot to develop and agree with their statement that someone else would have done this sooner or later, because I was already talking to one of my google friends about it a few weeks ago 
1 Like
Didn’t work for me.
Came up empty on 840i with cognac and I know there are some.
You might have selected the wrong cognac option for the 8 series. It’s something we’re working on clarifying. Some of those colors look the same or one will say cognac and one will say cognac with contrast stitch and it only applies to one model, not all models.
1 Like
Can you show me how you are able to do it through the BMWUSA website then? When I make my “perfect build” using the vehicle builder, it only gives me “local matches” that aren’t exact matches for the options I want at “a BMW center near you.” If I go Shopping -> View Local Inventory, there is no way to filter for exact packages on the vehicle. Please shoot me a link to where exactly on the BMWUSA website I can plug in that I want a 330i, M-Sport in Portimao Blue with only the dynamic handling package and it gives me a list of vehicles within a 100 mile radius?
1 Like
Great tool! Coffee on the way! Trying to determine how to search for the Alpina B7 with no luck… If I choose “ALPINA” as the model it will only show XB7. I can search for all 7 series and find them but wondering what I am missing on the model select?
@padrino I know the Alpina’s come in a bit odd compared to the rest. I’ll post a link here shortly to some.
Here you go. There was a slight bug with the organization of the Alpina B7. https://carfindr.co/vehicles?zipcode=11747&range=50000&sort_order=desc&years[]=&series[]=&series[]=7&models[]=&models[]=ALPINA&exteriors[]=&interiors[]=&features[]=&commit=Search
All I can say is “THANK YOU”. We were about to custom order an X5 M50i in a very unique color combo and options. But we found the EXACT vehicle in Georgia.
Going to save a few months in build time and likely a few grand in year-end discounts on an in stock unit.
8 Likes