I was coming out of an amazing deal from my last lease and am feeling kinda bad about this one.
I had a GLC 350e that I sold to Carmax for $1.6k net equity. It was in great condition and only had 8.5k miles, but I didn’t want to extend my lease. MB is no longer making the 350e and I didn’t want to be stuck owning it when the resell market goes back to normal.
I know I could have taken over someone else’s lease for a few months until the market got better, or taken out a Bolt for a year or something, but I honestly wanted to drive another new MB SUV and it clearly cost me. Sharing to understand what I could have tried to do better when negotiating this deal.
I asked around at many dealerships in my area and the deals were absolutely horrible, the “best” I could get was 2k DAS and $700+tax for $50k MSRP. Everyone blamed the shortage. Then I found a broker deal on the forum, but it was in SoCal. I asked one final dealership if they could beat that and here’s what they came back with:
2021 MB GLC300 4MATIC
Months: 36
Annual Mileage: 10k
MSRP: $49,410
Selling Price: $43,400
Monthly Payment: $518
Drive-Off Amount: $1,323 (+MSDs)
MSDs: 8 ($4,800)
MF: .00002
Residual: 54% ($26,681)
Region: NorCal
Leasehackr Score: 8.4
Leasehackr Calculator Link
I had to mess around with the acquisition fee number because on my lease it says “N/A” but it was the only thing on the calculator I could adjust to get my monthly payment.
Right off the bat I could tell the residual amount was high. Another thing I noticed was that they were only letting me do 8 MSDs instead of the max 10. I asked 3 different people about this until the manager said that I could not do more than that because the MF was already “capped out.” Which didn’t sound quite right to me but I honestly don’t know if it’s true.
At the end of the day I never seem to quite understand how much exactly a lease should come out to. Would love to know if anyone notices anything obvious they would have flagged to the dealer. Thanks!