A dealer is telling me they are affiliated with Carmax and if you have a actual carmax offer (once they see the car) they can take in the car as a trade and send off the car to carmax while you get to claim tax credit.
Does anyone know if thats possible or if carmax is an actual part of another dealer group
Great equity! Just curious did you get any quotes from a Honda or Honda affiliated dealership if this was thru Honda financial?
IIRC Carmax has a buying service where dealers can sell cars to them too called MaxOffer
They must be doing a simple dealer to dealer sale. I wouldnât worry about it. Take your check and move on 
Sold my '23 Subaru Crosstrek Limited to CarMax today. Had negative equity but it was worth it to not have the extra car affecting my DTI for an upcoming house purchase.
Overall: a mostly painless experience other than getting a certified check for a 10 day payoff only to find out Carmax uses a 15 day payoff. I was able to pay the difference with my debit card.
GiveMeTheVin beat Carmaxâs offer by $200 but by the time I was able to execute they came back $1200 lower, so Carmax won and GMTV is mailing me a check for $100. Also the GMTV dropoff was about 45 mins away, Carmax is 15.
Anybody have any luck selling a Hyundai lease to Carmax? I am being told HMF will not release title to Carmax. Thanks!
They never update it.
Nope
Not once
Never
Ever
Never
Great to hear. I hear there are a shortage of Toyotas right now.
I had a great experience selling my 2018 Audi A6 to CarMax in LA, and would highly recommend them.
My 2018 A6 was getting long in the tooth, but in great condition and low 15k miles. Got an online offer for $29.4k from Carmax. This was a couple hundred higher than Vroom or Shift, and thousands higher than what Audi dealers were offering as a trade-in and what some brokers offered.
I went to the Carmax near LAX, and their inspection matched the full online offer. This was a relief b/c I had already gotten a new car and was worried about last-minute gamesmanship. I filled out the info accurately, but who knows if they would have tried to short-change me for minor dings or curb rash, etc.
Paperwork was easy b/c I owned the car outright. Waited an hour after handing them the keys and paperwork, which was a little annoying but not to bad. And walked out with a check.
I probably could have gotten more through a private sale, but just didnât feel like dealing with that this time around. Wanted a quick and transition to get into a new lease and say goodbye to a beloved car. Probably the first car I really loved.
Curious if Iâm better off getting an offer from Carmax .com, or if I should show up in person.
I need a compelling reason to go in person, since having an appointment is meaningless and I canât bear the thought of doing this on a walk-in basis on a holiday weekend.
Wonât matter.
Interesting question, but impossible to test. Weâd need data for the identical car from online and in-person appraisals.
I think only someone with Carmax inside info could tell us if in-person without first doing online might be higher.
Donât bother going in person
Itâs going to be the same exact thing, the buying team for an in-person appraisal gets their data from the same source
Did you ever get an answer to this?
I did. Carmax as of about 2 months ago didnât buy HMF. They may now but I havenât checked. Either way, I used the Carmax offer as leverage and got an autonation dealer to come up 2500 on their offer and got an equity check for somewhere in the 3500-4500 range I canât recall off hand.
Yes just checked still donât will use my offer to shop around. Thanks!
Got a fun roller coaster adventure for you.
Coming up on the end of my Mazda CX-5 lease, I considered my options. Lease balance was about $19,000 with no payments remaining.
Online instant appraisal from Autonation was $21,500.
Then the car was damaged in a hit-and-run.
I got the bumper fixed for $600 and took it directly from the shop to Carmax, who appraised it in person at $22,500, which seemed perfectly reasonable to me. No one else even got close.
The following week (this past Saturday), I brought it to a Mazda dealer 3 hours away, where I was buying a new CX-90 PHEV, who said beforehand that they would match that Carmax price and âwith tax credits, itâll be close to $23k.â
All of which was, of course, a lie. As was the Sales managerâs grief about how Carmax wonât actually buy out my lease. I think they offered something like $19,700. But while I was there, I ran the VIN through Carmax online, and they had upped the expired offer to $23,000. Cool.
Six hours after arriving home last night with the new car and the unsold car, we experienced the worst hail storm in recent memory.
We didnât get the baseball sized havoc at our house, but both Mazdas endured a half hour of 2-3" hail. This morning, theyâre all pock-marked with dings and dents all over (even horizontally at the rear hatch).
So, the car I just bought and the car I aimed to sell (and should have already sold) are damaged. The CX-5 lease is up today.
I considered my options, which were grim. My best bet, I figured, was to hope Carmax will still give me something that will at least allow me to walk away with minimum money out of pocket (I was also 9000 miles over the lease, so I couldnât just turn it in and let insurance deal with the damage).
So, I nervously walked into Carmax today. Told the lady at the business desk about the hail situation, acknowledged that they would have to appraise it again as-is, and Iâd just hope for the best.
Twenty minutes later, she calls me over and opens the little dossier to revealâŚ
âTheyâve kept the appraisal at the same $23,000 as you got online,â she says, with a confused sort of look on her face. âItâs good until October 2, soââ
I interrupted her. âNow. Iâd like to sell it right now.â
And so I did. Toward the end of the process, when they were doing the final walk through in Service before printing the paperwork, someone apparently noticed the hail damage for the first time.
With a little pushback, imagine my surprise when they agreed to honor the price and chalk it up as an L for their appraisers.
Processed the paperwork pretty quickly and cut me a check for the $4000 in lease equity.
I donât think Iâve ever hurried out of a business and across the parking lot faster in my life.
Thanks for being a bro, Carmax. Good luck selling the CX-5 sized golf ball at auction next month.
