2018 BMW 330e
**MSRP: $55,XXX
**Selling Price: $48,840
**Monthly Payment: 319/mo + tax
**Drive-Off Amount: 2.5k DAS + MSDs of $2450
**Months:24 (36 months was a little more because of the huge ~25% discount)
**Annual Mileage:10,000
**MF:.00188 (bumped to .00238 to waive acq fee, dropped to .00203 after MSDs)
**Residual:67%
**Included Incentives: $6k lease credit, $1k loyalty
**Region: SoCal
**Leasehackr Score:~13
Above does not include the $500 BMWCCA rebate. Call it $299+ tax if you include it?
Or if you like, with a $0 TDAS payment it would be something like $400 + tax, including the $500 CCA rebate.
The story:
A while back, I had been looking to replace my BMW for a while, as my lease was ending soon. I was thinking about taking over a short term lease until I could decide what I wanted. But in the end, I was pretty sold on a 330e so I contacted a few brokers here who were all very nice and responsive but could not find the car I wanted (my local dealer offered me a punched, non-loaner 49xxx car for $2000 TDAS and $340/mo incl tax which was ok, but it was not exactly the car I wanted, and certainly not a unicorn). With the brokers, I passed on some good deals, mostly loaners, which were not unicorns but nevertheless also good deals. The contacts I made here were all great, but they were not really able (or willing) to do what I did at such a detailed level:
I went online and contacted >30 dealers all over SoCal NoCal, as far as AZ, NV, OR, and even WA via their dealer interface (this is, after all the LH-way, isn’t it?) I used Google Maps to find the dealers because the BMW website simply doesn’t list all of the dealers out there if you don’t search it correctly. I only contacted dealers who had a 330e with some or all of the options I wanted (some dealer sites are great about showing all options, others show none, and many are in-between). In any case, most of those that I contacted emailed or called me back by the next morning.
The salespeople were pretty savvy about incentives, MSDs, unicorn deals, etc and they were very decent/professional. Some first offers were, as expected, laughable. How about $2000 down and $800/mo for a 52xxx car? Some in fact said that they would not do the MF buy rate, and that their offer was final. What I also found was that most of the 2018 330e’s had been punched. Most were not loaners, just punched. This makes the car ineligible for the BMW CCA $500 rebate, which for a 2 year lease is a loss of ~ $20/mo in payments.
Lots of dealers offered pretty good deals, which for me amounted to between 10.4 and 11.8% off MSRP. But the ones with the higher discounts were either punched or loaded with too many costly options that I wasn’t interested in paying for. One dealer said they would be able to trade for a car that had the options I wanted, and offered a great deal, worksheet included. But they dropped off communication for a bit and I never followed up (I assume it’s because they were not interested in doing the deal in the end).
One dealer I contacted last week had all but one of the options I wanted (and only a few others I didn’t really want) and just flat out asked me what I wanted before offering an initial deal. I said, in addition to the $6000 rebate and $1000 loyalty, I wanted 12% off MSRP to match what I was getting on some of the cars that I ran across. In about an hour, I received an offer for exactly that.
I asked the dealer if I could disclose their name, and they were not keen on that because they said they didn’t want to do another deal like this. The “boss” in fact asked me to stop trying to tweak the lease (I wanted to put less TDAS, somehow fold the rebates in so they would not be taxed, and lock in January/wait for Feb to sign, in case incentives/MF improved) because it wasn’t worth his time. I am pretty sure they made some money on the car, but maybe $100? In any case, you don’t need this dealer’s name, you just have to do what LH teaches: 1) Find all of the dealers that you think will work with you (and that you might consider driving/flying to to pick up the car–I didn’t have to do either, but I was willing to spend $100 1-way to NoCal to pick up and drive back–fares are cheap here); 2) contact and re-contact; 3) do everything before you go in.
Patience and persistence may reward you.
FYI, lots of BMW rebates increased by $500 for February. Lease support for 2018’s may end ~3-1-19, depending on inventory/motivation at HQ. This means in about 3 weeks, whatever leftover cars they have could be screaming deals .
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