Dealerships are known for providing convenience in terms of determining the value of a car. You remain protected from doing the extensive research, finding the right buyer and performing all the paperwork.
However, they are businesses, therefore, they have goals other than pleasing your car selling or valuation needs. Hence, below is a small effort by Sell My Car Today to comprehend the drawbacks of relying on dealerships for car valuation.
Reasons Not to Depend on Dealerships for Car Valuation
Making Profits
As we mentioned earlier, selling car to dealership or determining your vehicle’s value means you are dealing with a business. Therefore, they will concentrate on making profits; favouring their goals more than anything else. Also, they will then prioritise this factor over fairness.
They use low trade-in offers oftentimes, leading to presenting a low initial value. This is primarily because they have an idea about you negotiating with them in future. Thus, this makes them look flexible alongside enhancing their profit on the entire deal.
Nevertheless, you must keep in mind that for car valuation, dealerships are usually not expensive. This means, they can provide such services for free in order to grab the attention of potential customers.
Lack of Honesty or Transparency
Another reason why you should consider an alternative, for instance, independent car valuation, is the lack of transparency or honesty from the dealerships. They might not disclose all the costs, like for admin work and reconditioning.
Also, to attract you, they might overestimate your car’s value, and then lower the offer during discussions later. This way, you accept a less beneficial deal, due to the sense of urgency.
In terms of transparency when grasping your car’s value, dealerships most likely may not elaborate on all the aspects they are pondering on. Therefore, you are unable to determine whether or not their assessment is fair.
Inaccuracy in Car Valuation & the Alternative
As cited before, you are unaware of the factors leading to their free car valuation, for instance. And they are also popularly known for being inaccurate in this matter. This is all because of them being profit-driven.
However, the easy method as an alternative is the use of online tools. As per our research, this is not the perfect solution, but is conveniently approachable. You can perform this task efficiently by using multiple valuation tools and providing the correct information regarding your vehicle.
One tip we would like to share is to focus on car dealership valuation. Consider tangible and intangible assets, such as inventory, equipment, reputation and customer relationships. Evaluate its future earning potential as well. This way, you can identify their profit-driven behaviour and know how good they are in satisfying their customers.
Besides, please check out our article on selling your car online for more guidance.
Conclusion
Dealerships are helpful for selling or determining the current market value of a car. They keep you safe from the hectic research process and even find you the right buyer. Nevertheless, their services come with drawbacks as well which makes a person rethink this choice.
One imperative factor is them being businesses, therefore, they will prioritise making profits. You might not be able to see the fairness when dealing with such dealerships. Also, there is the lack of honesty and transparency, resulting in not availing the actual list of all the possible costs, such as for administrative work.
Another reason is that they will initially overestimate the value of your vehicle, just to grab your attention and lower the offer later. Lastly, we wrote about dealerships valuation which can entirely help in finding the right option.