Has anyone on here had any experience with that website or one like it. The concept is appealing to me but didn’t know if anyone has tried it. Thanks!
it does work if you do have attractable lease. the people assisting you in the process will try to up sell you on every little product like posting the vehicle, advertising it on the home page ETC but if you refuse they will provide more and more discounts. the basic one is fine and they will say that your lease is attractive because they are paid to get you enrolled which they charge you for.
I once posted my bmw 328i coupe lease on swapalease and had someone take over within 1 month of posting. If you have an attractable lease and looking to get out, it may be worth a try. FYI, my experience is from 2014.
Swapalease.com is the way to go. I paid $150 and had a featured listing guaranteed until it was sold. Also, lifetime member if I want to take over a lease. The site has a lot of traffic and I had at least 5 serious inquiries. The car was swapped fast. The only complaint was the site has an inbox that I had to check. No email alerts. Also, they should add the pics for you. No bulk image upload feature. The site is clunky at best. But so is craigslist.
I took over Maserati Ghibli lease…He paid $5k drive off and his monthly was $850…I took over the because he offered 4k in incentive cash to lower monthly… there was 18 months remaining… he also paid for all the fees …
I just finished a take over on an RC F lease from swapalease.com. It had 18 months left and only had 7k miles on it. The original lessee had put down over 10k to get the payments to $640/month. Lexus took more than a month to get the paperwork done, but it was worth it.
I worked with TFS on my swap. In order to expedite, overnight all paperwork. get a FedEx account and put the account number on all paperwork and they will bill FedEx.
When a seller offers incentive cash do actually give you cash money or do they pay the financial institution the $ and it lowers the payment when the lease is transferred?
They give cash money to the new lessee and/or allow them to keep the deposit.
it’s just a marketplace to connect people to get in/out of a lease. Worked well for me. Posted my BMW on there and was gone in a weekend. All depends if your car is a good deal. A lot of garbage not hat site too so you gotta sift through it.
Each leasing company is different with lease transfer rules. Lexus takes forever, BMW is quick. Transfer fees vary. Many don’t allow lease transfer with <6 months on the lease etc. Their customer service will walk you through it if you have never done it.
If trying to get into a lease, always negotiate more. If they want cash down, tell them no or meet them in the middle. Also try to get them to at least split the transfer fee. On my last lease i had the person taking over my car lease pay the transfer fee in full. People that want to get rid of their car are in a worse position. Unless the car is a super steal, there’s always room to further negotiate.
If you’re trying to get out of a lease and you have a bad lease to begin with, it’s unlikely you find a taker unless you give some sort of incentive. People aren’t stupid. Also if you’re trying to dump the car toward the end of the lease because you drove too many miles, also tricky. Again people aren’t that stupid.
I did that. I gave them my Fedex business information. They would do stupid things like send him all the paperwork (including my half) and ask him to forward it to me. It was a clown show.
Question for those that took over someone else’s lease via swapalease…would you be willing to look up the contact info of a particular listing? I’m not convinced to pay $60 to contact a specific seller and find out it is not available.
If you live in a state such as Virginia where you pay the tax on the entire vehicle, does that apply on Swap a Lease when you take over a lease? Anyone has experience on this?
@jkrupsur00 i don’t know how each lease finance company handles it exactly but when the new person takes over the lease, the tax gets recalculated according to where the car will be registered. @OchoChino can chime in on this as he just did this, my understanding is that he was sent a bill from the state as a lump sum payment due for taxes after taking over the lease because in his state they collect all the taxes up front.
Thanks for the mention @305Hackr
Guys, before I begin, I cannot stop and say how grateful I am to have @305Hackr and @nyclife as well as this community/forum that helped me through the whole lease transfer process as it was my first time. Despite the red flags that my fellow forum members warned me about, I’m glad it pulled through and I cannot be happier with the car.
So what happened was that NY charges a 8.875% tax on the sum total of your remaining lease payments that you have and charge it upfront. So BMW had paid the state on my behalf and had billed me along with my monthly.
In my honest opinion, I am really happy with the car but I wasn’t expecting all the expenses just to take delivery of the car. For the low monthly payment of $490/month on a fully loaded 435i Gran Coupe, I had to spend $1,250 on shipping along with another $980+ on my sales tax. Luckily, I had the transferor reimburse me for the $500 lease transfer fee.
Now, I want to begin the modifications on the car and if I had done a lease transfer locally, I would’ve put the money towards that.
So, my first advice and take from this is, if you can, STAY LOCAL unless the payment is really attractive and you know what you’re getting into.
Regards,
Jay
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