No. My payoff letter I pulled just a minute ago from IFS says
"If you wish to purchase your vehicle, please contact your Infiniti retailer and set up an appointment to facilitate your payoff. At that
time, your retailer will calculate and collect applicable sales tax, and official fees, that are not included in your payoff amount."
You’ll need to pay sales tax on the payoff amount on the letter + purchase option fee (usually $300) + any fee the dealer tacks on ($80) to buy the car, and then wait for the title before you can sell the car to Carvana or anyone else. You may also need to request a fresh title with just your name on it as some car buying companies won’t buy the car with Nissan/Infiniti Financial listed on it even if you have paid off the lease and bought the car.
Looks like for most people, Infiniti’s policy of not allowing 3rd party buyouts has pretty much locked people into their leases, or selling to an Infiniti dealer at a substantial loss compared to a 3rd party buyer like CarMax. When I sold my car to Autonation, at least they were willing to match CarMax’s offer, but with Infiniti totally shutting down 3rd party sales as reported in this thread, I can’t imagine any Infiniti dealer wanting to match CarMax etc. They know you that you really don’t have an option but to sell to them if you want to get out of the lease early (unless you wanted to eat the sales tax + fees + time to get title).
It sucks, but these are desperate times with low inventories and crazy high used car prices, so Infiniti wants to maximize their/their dealers’ bottom line at the cost of making life harder for their customers. I would say it’s short sighted as turning off customers isn’t the best way to conduct business in the longer run, but the way things are going for Infiniti, they may be more worried about short term survival than anything else.
Anyone know if Toyota Financial has any similar restrictions? I just leased a base Tacoma 6 months ago and Carana is offering $6k OVER my payoff right now! Want to jump on that!
Jump on it.
GMTV won’t buy from Toyota anymore…so it’s a gamble on your part.
I wouldn’t say “courtesy”…before this recent craziness, it was hard to find a lease that wasn’t upside down throughout the entire term. By letting people dispose of the vehicle early, there was a good chance the owner would lease another car from that same finance company (people tend to stick with their brands)…more business, and thus profits, for them.
It will be interesting to see how car leases are structured going forward, and if any significant changes will be made…I’m sure they are looking at all this activity and wondering how they insure it doesn’t happen again!
From the comments above, it’s hard to tell if a Nissan dealer can do an Infiniti pay off? Does anyone know?
No one answered that one yet. Can you try and report back?
Sold my Infiniti lease to an Nissan dealer on May 21. No problems. Im in Socal.
I totally agree. I just had the same experience today at carmax. I was told that they would return the payoff and the policy changed a month ago…with no notice. I could have been a life long Infiniti customer. Love the cars. But I refuse to be strong armed by IFS. My dollar is powerful and I will spend it elsewhere.
How did Infiniti strong arm you? You agreed to a contract. This isn’t exclusive to Infiniti.
Thank you for the question. I believe that forcing the sale option only to Infiniti dealerships, empowers the dealership to not be as competitive with pricing the car…ultimately making it harder to get out of the lease. This is a change in the way they do business and I don’t feel like it is customer focused. I hope this helped you understand my point of view.
I understand your point of view. Look at it from their perspective. You and IFS agreed to a contract for 24/36/39 months. You are looking to exit that binding contract early. They don’t have to allow it in any form. The vehicle belongs to them. They, as a courtesy, allow the early exit through one of their franchised/contracted dealers.
This isn’t unique to Infiniti, there are plenty of companies with similar policies. While their policy might have changed their legal obligation to offer it hasn’t, they don’t have one. Some companies simply adjust the buyout to market value. Some don’t allow third party buyouts at all. Legally they could enforce the full contract and make you pay the rest of the payments in order to exit and return the car to them.
The payout includes all of the payments and fees due to them. The payout closes the deal. If they didn’t want folks to have the ability to buy the cars then don’t offer a payout. It’s not like they are losing anything on the deal.
You can still execute all of the lease termination options that you agreed to in your lease, no?
This is not true. By selling the car at your contract stipulated buy out amount, they are losing money vs selling their asset for market value. They are contractually obligated to sell it to you for that value, but no one else. They’re not going to willingly lose money unless they’re required to per contractual agreement.
Agree 100% with this. You can always execute the early buyout yourself and sell it to whomever you would like.
Point taken. Thank you for the clarification.
Can you clarify? I got a letter saying infiniti is temporarily halting all lease buyouts to third party dealers and car companies…however I am assuming we can still sell the car to any Nissan dealer?? Let me know how you did it and what Nissan dealer please 
See below
The changes were outlined in a letter sent out to Infiniti dealers yesterday, stating “To support Infiniti retailers in today’s current pre-owned market, IFS will no longer allow non-Infiniti dealerships to purchase lease vehicles grounded by customers at their locations.”
You should call multiple Nissan and Infiniti dealers. Just like a purchase, you won’t know beforehand who is more motivated to make it happen.