What are the numbers?
You can’t spam an entity that begs you to contact it.
The “Meet Sexy Russian Girls” crap in my email spam filter is spam.
When I visit sexyRussiangirlsblahblah.com and fill out a request, my transmission to them is not spam.
“Being difficult to work with” translation-this guy knows his shit, I’m afraid of the competition, etc.
Numbers they sent me are very vague. If they take care of my last 2 lease payments ($640 in total) it’s $288 down $288 a month. If I take care of my last 2 payments its $272, $272 down. This is for a 15k per year lease. I do not have the MF yet, but RV is looking at 61% still. I think they might get more aggressive as this virus thing gets more out of hand. They are supposed to call me back today to take the deposit.
I’ve gone the email route my last 5 purchases, and I can say that by default, they always beat those online third parties.
You’ll email 15, 10 will reply. 5 will quote you something that’s already on their website. The remaining 5 will try to be competitive, and you’ll see a pretty good price. I then walk in and buy at that price. No need to further haggle.
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I was referring to contacting dealers for an initial offer.
Maybe the ISM’s have responding to emails in their job description, but do they always have to respond to the ones they find demeaning?
You have two payments left worth about $400 (just calculating over 36 months).
Have you checked Carvana, VROOM, etc. to see if you have any equity?
I got a quote from Vroom last week and they were at about $800 less than payoff and wouldn’t budge on it.
This was a grammatically poorly written article and factually incorrect.
As a matter of fact, the FTC link the guy links at the bottom of his page specifically mentions that there’s nothing wrong with matching:
"Q: Our company monitors competitors’ ads, and we sometimes offer to match special discounts or sales incentives for consumers. Is this a problem?
A: No. Matching competitors’ pricing may be good business, and occurs often in highly competitive markets. Each company is free to set its own prices, and it may charge the same price as its competitors as long as the decision was not based on any agreement or coordination with a competitor."
I also watched the video of the “prisoner’s dilemma” and I will never get those 5 minutes back in my life. It was a terrible video that answered questions no one asked and convoluted the entire thing. You couldn’t pay me to take advice from that guy.
Here is the response I received form a dealer as the car I inquired about was not loaner but used. Apparently he has stock of similar models but not advertised/listed in the dealer website. Is that possible? I mean do dealers keep few cars off of their website?
Yes as I mentioned this particular car is currently in my loaner fleet so it’s not being advertised on the web.
I can have it set aside for you to come and drive it of course.
When I was looking to purchase a Honda Accord 7 years ago, I contacted close to 10 Honda dealers via email. I worked with two dealers who had the best price, with only $100 separating them.
The dealer with the lowest price told me they had “sold” the car after I had come in to finalize paperwork (I had called them the day before to confirm the car was still available). They lied to me and I vowed to tell everyone I knew not to do business with them. I ended up going to the other dealer and bought the car from them. It was the smoothest transaction and their first offer was their best offer.
I understand that car buying/car leasing has evolved over the years, but I used the same tactic 2 years ago when I was looking to lease an Audi.
We (buyers) have become more educated, thanks to sites like LH and Edmunds. More and more car sales people know that and some understand their best leverage is having you negotiate in person for hours.
If you are looking to buy/lease a car and the “best offer” you have received is 1-2% off your target price, going into a dealership might be the best leverage to scoring a great deal. This may not apply to everyone or every deal, but spending a few minutes to finalize a deal in person might be worth it in some cases.
Don’t get me wrong, I will continue to do all initial car buying/leasing negotiations via email or phone.
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Interesting.
If you want help with the deal, post it in “Ask the Hackrs.”
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Yep it’s just a way to side-step the customer grinding, let them make their own decision, and allow salespeople to move onto others.
I certainly believe your experience, the problem is the auto sales industry changes its antics (strategy) every 18 months so we never figure out their way to higher profits.
As soon as we get close, things change all over again.
Bear
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How do you " know your numbers and if the deal is achievable"? To the extent I understand your strategy, if you know this magic number you just march into your local dealer and hope they take your deal and don’t bother soliciting offers from any other dealers in person, let alone online, because that’s the best price you’ll find.
Unicorns are irrelevant to this conversation. The point is that there are dealer websites featuring Internet Salespersons and buttons luring you to “Click for Our Price” who have no intention of providing a price let alone do a deal online.
I have found that once the salesperson determines that you are a serious and sophisticated buyer, if they are serious internet sales outfit (rather using the web to garner leads), they do indeed get motivated.
You know your numbers by doing research before going to the dealer. Similar to taking the comps when buying a house. You come in here and other forums, see what people are getting for their cars and in what regions, find out what the max incentives are, and then present an offer to the dealer that is fair for both parties and acceptable.
For example, you come in here and see that everyone is getting M340’s for 13% off before incentives and there’s about 4K in incentives including loyalty. If you qualify for all the incentives, then just work 13% from the MSRP in the vehicle and then apply the incentives and that’s your offer. Shoot that out to as many dealers as you can and see which one bites.
It’s a pretty straight forward process.
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Salespeople want to make money. One strategy is to just low-ball and keep negotiating until you are able to reach the middle ground (which is your fair price). You could also just send emails to people with numbers saying that if your final deal, but I haven’t had much luck with this strategy (usually they still want to negotiate).
Anybody wanting to get a good deal needs to put in the time. The people who get unicorns and crazy discounts on cars are the ones who put in time to do the research. If you didn’t want to do that, you could just take whatever the dealer offers you or just hire a broker and pay them a small fee for a good deal (2nd one is much better).
The forum is here to help if you have a deal, so feel free to ask about your numbers.
Well, to be fair, it’s a pretty straightforward process for models that get mentioned a lot on here (like BMWs). Lincoln Corsairs? Not so much (and thus it’s much harder to get a sense of what’s realistic, IMHO). I think for “oddball” models, reaching out to a broker might be helpful?
Lincoln Corsair is a brand new car.
Leases will not be good until it sits for a little bit on dealer lots and Ford has to start piling on the incentives to get them to move.
BMW knows this and inflates its residuals in addition to supplying incentives to keep the volume up. Remember that BMW also has some sought-after models that can sell at or over MSRP, so the dealers also money that way.
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I dont think they have any over MSRP vehicles right now.
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