Insider Secrets: How To Sell Your Car Without a Dealer!

I'm going to teach you something that no car dealer does and that's how to sell your car privately. You have many options to dispose of the old car you don't want. You can sell it privately. You can trade it into the dealership. You can give it away. You can take it to the junkyard. Most people like to trade or sell it privately. Where there's pros and cons to both of those things, we're going to focus strictly on how to sell your car privately in today's market. With over 23 years in the car business, tens of thousands of customers, millions and millions of scenarios and conversations with people wanting to sell their cars, I don't know anyone more qualified to teach you how to get the most money for that old car you don't want. Now, there is a science in order to sell your car. The very first step is to detail the car. Detailing the car doesn't mean just going to the local car wash and using their free vacuum and sweeping it out. I'm talking about paying for a professional detail or you spending two to three to four hours, depending on the vehicle, to clean it yourself. That's what a professional detail does because on average, a clean car will bring $750 more on the purchase price than a dirty car. Imagine yourself. If you go car shopping, do you want to buy a clean car or do you want to buy a dirty car? Self-explanatory. If you're willing to buy a dirty car, you're one in one million customers I've ever talked to that says, hey, yeah, I'll buy a dirty car. No problem. I love other people's filth. I love other people's germs. I love other people's disgusting fingernails and boogers and everything else in that car to save a couple hundred bucks. And to go into a little bit more detail about prepping your car, you want to make sure that check engine lights are fixed. You don't know how many times I've heard, oh, it's just a sensor. Oh, it's just this. I had a friend diagnose it and it was this. You know how many times I've heard it's just this and it's cost me $1,000 to fix? I'm telling you, fix that because it's going to be worth more money. You'd be surprised on if you can fix it yourself with all the YouTube videos out there or have an independent service facility repair that for much cheaper than what a dealership can do. Make sure if you've got stars in your windshield that they're at least filled in. If you have a cracked windshield, fix it. If you have dents and dings, fix those. Minor ones aren't that big of a deal. Customers on the private market will accept those dents and dings, the little door dings, you know, paint chips. They'll accept those where at a dealership like mine or a big franchise store like a Chevy or Ford or Honda or Toyota dealership, they wouldn't accept them at all. From you as a consumer, they absolutely will so you can save some money by not fixing paint touch-ups and small door dings. Number two is setting the price. You've got to set the price the correct way. If you set your price too high, people simply will not contact you. This is not the 80s or the 90s or the early 2000s where you can negotiate back and forth. People do not negotiate on car deals anymore when the price is accurate. And that's where this guy comes in play. You've got to go on your computer and what I like to do is go to Carvana. When you go to Carvana, you can tell them, hey, I want to sell my car. Let's start looking at that right there. Hey, now you see what Carvana is willing to give you. So now you want to be able to get more money than what Carvana is going to give you. We go to CarMax and we see what CarMax is going to give us. There you go. And then next important aspect is, is you want to look at Kelly Buick private party sale price. That's what you are doing. You are private party selling the car on the private party market. You can see what they're doing. So now we've got three different figures on what that car is worth. And you've got to remember that there are no two used cars the same. However, you can compare apples to apples when you're searching for the price that you want to sell your car to. So what I love to do is go to CarGurus. CarGurus is a fantastic website. So that way you can put in the year, the make, the model, and the trim. Having the trim in there is extremely important. So that way you can see what is on the market and you can go out 50, 100, 150 miles. So that way you can see what the market is doing. And when you're researching those, you definitely, like I just said, you want to make sure that you're only researching the trim and the model year that you are selling. If you have a 2016 and you start researching 2017s, guess what? You're going to be asking way too much. And most importantly, you want to know your vehicle's history in order to price it correctly. Do you have a minor accident on your car packs? Probably not that big of a deal. A moderate, severe, or anything else is definitely 100% of a big deal. Me as a dealership owner, I don't buy moderate accidents sight unseen. I don't buy them from auctions. I don't buy them from consumers. I don't buy them at all unless I can physically see them because a moderate accident definitely can have frame damage and whatnot. So pricing your car appropriately based on other cars on the market is extremely important. So make sure you check the car facts as well. Second to price, the number one thing that sells a used car is the pictures. Pictures is number three. And it's extremely important that you take the right pictures and the right amount of pictures. You have no idea how many bad pictures I see on Facebook marketplace and private sell listings all over the internet. And those people are wondering why they have not got leads or whatnot. That's because consumers, you're looking through an inventory on websites all over the world, and you're like, don't like it, move on. Don't like it, move on. The first picture is the key one that gets the attention. First and foremost, you want to make sure that your car is in an open area. A great location to take pictures of your car is at a church parking lot during the week. Sunday morning, probably not going to be wide open. And then the very first thing you want to do is turn your steering wheel one rotation so that that wheel is just like that. And then your very first picture you take is this one right here. When you take this picture right there, it's going to look absolutely amazing. Now I've got exactly all the pictures you need to take on chevydudestore.com as a digital download. So that way, you know exactly what 20 pictures to take, because these 20 pictures you take are extremely important. There's a reason why we sell so many cars here at a little independent dealership in Georgetown, Indiana is because pictures sell cars. So after you get done with that first picture and you're getting ready to take your 19, you make that wheel straight and you continue on those pictures. So obviously the next picture is from the side and then we keep going around. We take quarter shots of back here. We take all the way to the back and we keep going around before we get into the car. The reason we do this, because what's the very first thing you do when you go to look at a car? Generally speaking, we look here and we walk around the car just like this. So you're basically creating a digital walk around. And again, if you want to know all 20 pictures to take, so for your listings, just go to chevydudestore.com and download the digital guide. Number four is extremely important. This is literally what's going to make or break your car deal. And that is description. You have to write a compelling description. You have to set yourself apart from everyone out there and you have to make sure that people understand everything about your car. Imagine that someone's up at 1230 in the morning in their pajamas reading about your car. How are you going to help them if you don't answer the Facebook marketplace or other listing postings that you have out there? Well, with the power of AI and chat GPT, you literally can write one of the best descriptions out there. And I've been using way before chat GPT is even out there. I've been using systems like this to write my descriptions. And now we use chat GPT to write all of our stuff. So to save some time, I'm going to show you exactly what I write. Write a sales description for my car, make it professional and funny. And what we want to make sure we do that I don't do on my listings because I'm not selling my car privately is we want to ensure that people understand that you have a clean title. We don't want a rebuilt car. We don't want a salvage car. People out there just don't know. So you want to make sure that you write clean title. But most importantly, the very first words of your description is the vehicle you're selling. 2011 Chevy Silverado 2500 crew cab LT trim. I tell the exterior color. I tell the interior color and what that is. If it's leather, cloth, whatever the case may be on this particular vehicle. I put in quotation marks because chat GPT reads that most on the market are cloth. And then I go into all sorts of things to owner clean car facts with my dealership. We do 172 point inspection. You don't have to do that, but you can certainly say that, hey, the car's been professionally detailed, right? Let them know that it's been detailed. And then you go into all of the options that are available. And then all you have to do is hit this little triangle button down here. And it's going to read out exactly what you need it to read out. I use chat GPT for that's a paid feature. So if you don't pay it, whatever available is to you at the time is absolutely just fine. And if you like what chat GPT wrote, then perfect copy, paste it, save it. So that way you can use it in your description. And that's how easy it is. If you're wondering, like, what options do I have? Do I have a clean car fact? There's actually a way that you can get your window sticker if you do not have it from when you bought the car. If it was used to you, sometimes those window stickers aren't there. If you bought it new and you misplaced the window sticker because you simply just didn't care about it. If you go to monroneylabels.com, we'll put it right here on the screen. You can purchase a monroney label for like less than 10 bucks. Right. And then also if you buy a car facts, a lot of times car facts does produce the window sticker in recent years. Number five is now we get it finally listed for sale. So that way you can find prospective buyers and sell it. And I want to go back to number two. Let's literally just popped up on my phone. And please do not do this when you're researching the or price. Do not post on Facebook and say, Hey, what is my car worth? Because you are not going to get any applicable data that is actually relevant to you. We have no idea what trim level this car is. We have no idea what the car facts is on this car. We have no idea if this is a clean title or salvage title. We don't know anything. So back to number five, pricing your car to sell. This is where are we going to sell this car out? I made up a good list here. So auto trader is a good one that allows private individuals to list their cars. Auto trader is a huge company and you have dedicated people going there looking for cars. You got eyes on car gurus. Another one that's probably one of the biggest websites out there and the best websites out there. And I sell a lot of cars off car gurus. So you are competing with dealers on these spaces. But if you have your car price correctly, a great description in great pictures, you're going to rank on those out there. Facebook marketplace. We also have one called auto tempest. We have Facebook groups. There's a lot of Facebook groups out there that are selling cars. This is a great one. Let's just go old school. Let's go back to the 80s and 90s. Park your car out in front of your house, a busy road, a company that allow you to do it. Put a for sale sign in it with a phone number. It's amazing on how well that works. We have all these digital tools to us, but listing it out there for sale is simply that way and that easy. So those are your best tools, I think, out there. And of course, you guys can throw some comments down there if you know some other ones. There are some cautions that you need to worry about that we'll have to get into in a future video. 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