Greedy beggers

[Morgan84]

How many of you follow the classic car auction sites and then go ebay hunting to see the quick killings some try to make; it's amazing how much brass neck some of these greedy beggers have. Yes, I know people need to make a living,but some are to the next level !

[Felly Magic]

Seen that a lot lately on ebay. 'Projects' going for pennies, then about a week or so later, its on ebay again with a different seller, starting at twice the price

[Morgan84]

Also seems to be thousands of barns all over the place full of cars

[ShiteRider]

Some twat bought a cortina estate off gumtree a while ago for a grand did fuck all to it and tried to sell it on ebay a week later for six, didn't sell unsurprisingly. Some people are just pricks.

[Morgan84]

I know someone who bought a car for £825, drove it home and put it up for £2995 without doing anything too it; I gloated as week by week the price kept falling to way below what I was offered it for 'trade' !

[warren t claim]

It's called the free market economy.I really don't have a problem with people making a profit.

[vulgalour]

I'm never sure if this rant is about someone else getting lucky or a genuine distaste for profiteering.  If I could snag a Mk1 Escort for 50p and sell it on for £5BAJILLIONEURODOLLAHS I totally would.  I'd then go and spend my ill gotten gains on BL tat, very pointy shoes and buying everyone* on Autoshite a pie and a pint.

[Cavcraft]

Exactly, Vulgalour.

 

Morgan: If you won a brand new car in  a charity raffle for £1.00 would you sell it at cost? I doubt it. The people buying classic cars then trying to punt them on for big money are playing quite a risky game, they're not easy to sell at the best of times and they obviously stand some risk of losing money.

If you don't like their prices, don't buy anything and (most importantly) if they buy their cars from auctions or newspaper adverts (or whatever) then plenty of other people have had the chance to buy them.

[Micrashed]

Exactly, I sold the spare engine to the bike on ebay to a trader, 

Got £30 for it and got it shifted out of my life pretty quickly.

He has it stripped and up on the bay for a lot more. Good luck to him I say he is likely to have it hanging around for a while until it sells to someone who wants that bit, whereas I have some cash right here and now.

Everyone is happy.

[Wilko220]

If there are people around who are happy/stupid enough to pay the inflated prices then I don't see a problem - as long as there is no deception involved.

[trigger]

Aye, we've all done it, I bought that Mk3 Escort for £500, sold it a few months later for £800, the next guy sold it for £1500 and the last time I saw it it was up for £2800 in Ireland looking exactly the same as I sold it. Good luck to them.

[Station]

Bought Suzuki Whizzkid for £750 (it had been reduced over a few months from £1145), and sold it for £2000. Also same with Renault Fuego Turbo, made 50% profit. At least I owned and drove them for at least six - twelve months.

[NorfolkNWeigh]

There's an amusing example of this on Autotrader at the moment . Saw an ad for a 57 plate Merc E280 cdi estate at £6795, at the bottom of the text it says SOLD,fair enough he couldn't work out how to remove the ad .

 

Two cars down the same car is up for £7295, only difference is that now the plate has been valued* at £1000!( it reads HA57ENS) . A different number and supposedly private. Too big for wife ( yeah right that's why mine won't su...oh sorry got distracted) apparently,must have grown between looking at it and getting it home.

 

Anyway assuming he chipped the first guy to at least £6.5( maybe more) that's a nice little tickle,as they say.

As others have said we all do it given half a chance ,but to have the ad next to the one you bought it from and claim to be private is taking the piss a bit!

[Cavcraft]

Cor, the bloody cheek of it! Fancy trying to make £500 on a seven grand car after you've just spent out on a private plate?

How does he sleep at night?

[garbaldy]

People making a profit on anything doesn't bother me, what does bother me is when you get the full sob story and give them a good price only for it to appear on evil bay the very next day for nearly double.

I seem to be good at buying things in haste then selling at a loss hopefully this maxus will prove me wrong.

[Barry Cade]

It's all Mike Brewers fault.

[Des]

If you don't like it then move to communist Russia.

I can't see anything morally wrong with someone speculating in buying and selling an old car, no more than anyone getting lucky at the bookies keeping their winnings. The practice can keep some old cars alive as an alternative to just selling off the rare parts and weighing in the remainder. It's the ones that pop back up for sale with a lower mileage or described as a genuine Mexico of suchlike bullshit that merit our combined disapproval, rage, fury.

[cort16]

I get around this problem by selling all the cars I buy for a crippling loss. It's a system I've been operating successfully* for at least 10 years.

[dugong]

I tend to break even on the crap I've been forced to sell, although it looks like the GS will be sold at a loss.

[Spiny Norman]

Can't help thinking there's more than touch of green eyed monster about it.

 

If you complain about someone buying a car for a grand and selling it for two, all you're really moaning about is not thinking about doing it first/being beaten to the draw/being too poor to play the game.

 

It's just small green pieces of paper anyway.....

[Pillock]

If I was to buy a car for £250, run it for a year, and sell it for £650 - then I'd consider that a result. I did exactly that, and was quite chuffed. Nobody has ever told me off for it.

But if I was to only own it for a week, then I'm a naughty human being if I made the same profit? What's the cutoff point - a month? 94 days? 

 

The people that put chod through classic auctions know the deal - they know they can get more if they hold out, advertise it privately, deal with ebay mongtards etc. But they've also got the risks of it not selling, or they get comeback on a knackered car. I'd say that's pretty much fair game.

 

I've never, ever heard anyone utter the phrase "ooh no, that's too much. Give me less money" when selling a car.

[Bren]

When I sold my gixxer in august I was convinced it was worth at least £1k - in the end I got £850 - nobody else bid.

 

The guy who won the auction turned up and put it in his wagon - he freely admitted he was a trader and could'nt believe that nobody else had bid on the bike.

 

The next day it was for sale in a classified ad for £1695.

 

It's still up for sale at £1695. He will never get that, but he will make on it.

 

Whether it's private or trade, it will only sell for what somebody thinks it's worth.

 

The same with cars unfortunately - nobody has any folding any more.

[drum]

Nothing wrong with making a profit and nothing wrong with taking the piss out of the clowns who try but fail miserably.

 

I love buying old tat and would love it even more if I could make a living doing it. In fact, never mind making a living, breaking even would be nice. The main reason I buy old chod us to reduce my motoring losses.

 

A wheeler dealer I am not!

[chaseracer]

I've probably told you this but about eight years ago I lucked into a solid mid-70s 2CV van (with a load of spares) for £400. The bloke was moving to France and needed to get rid, but even he laughed at my initial not-entirely-serious bid of half that number. Word got out and a few days later I was offered £1200 for it as it stood (minus spares...)

[cort16]

That's the bottom line init? If you're happy with what you get when you sell it it doesn't really matter what the next person sells it for.

[chaseracer]

Exactly.

 

The buyer of my van did some light tarting-up, gave it a ticket and some rent, used it for the Kelso world meeting then moved it on for £1900. It was then properly restored and repainted, and sold to Europe for somewhere north of three grand.

 

A case study in added value.

[eddyramrod]

Sometimes there's a degree of satisfaction involved.  I imported this, as we all know, last year:

 

I'd been trying to sell it in Cyprus for over a year by then, at ever-reducing disastrous-loss prices.  So I shipped it.  I advertised it, again at stupidly low prices, and finally got a phone call from a bloke in Watford.  He beat me down, screwed me to the floor in fact, but he hadn't even seen the car in the flesh and I just wanted it gone, so I let him have it.  Bit of faffing around later, and he's registered it (it did, as I suspected, get a K suffix, being built in May 72) and swopped the original steels for (wrong) Ghia alloys; and it's on ebay for a grand over what he gave me.  That's after he spun me a line about wanting to use it as his daily so he could keep his 1970 Charger for best.  Imagine my delight when not only did it fail to sell, it re-appeared with a new start price: exactly what he gave me.  A few days later I looked and got the "no longer available" message.  I took that to mean he'd accepted a lower offer.

Nice to know it's not just me that can't sell that bucket!  (I'd come to hate it in the end, can you tell?)

[chaseracer]

Is that the one that had Archbishop Makarios in the back at some point?

[eddyramrod]

Allegedly, yes.  I thought that would make it priceless over there, but in fact it was just worthless.

[NorfolkNWeigh]

Cor, the bloody cheek of it! Fancy trying to make £500 on a seven grand car after you've just spent out on a private plate?

How does he sleep at night?

That's partly the point, the number hasn't changed . It's just that all of a sudden the plate that's been on the car forever is worth a grand. The guy was still using the same pictures as the ad above it.