#AuctionMonday

When you have 120 dealers looking at the same exact car on a Monday morning, you have three options if you plan on buying a car.

1) Bid

2) Watch

3) Leave

After I saw a 2003 Infiniti FX35 with 220,558 miles sell for $9100 plus the auction fee, I left for good.

A 1991 Chevy Caprice in faded battleship grey went for $3000 at last week’s sale. It had only 37k miles. But none of the bells and whistles that would make such an old timer truly desirable. Now the 1996 Chevy Caprice with 71k and leather was a completely different story. Garage kept. No paint fade. All the bells and whistles in good working order. I was expecting around $5000 for this ancient beast.

It went for $5100. Truth be told this was the first auction with relatively decent prices in a long time. The 4th of July makes at least some of the dealers go away which was more than OK with me. I got four cars today. None of which were anything special.

Some folks say that stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Well, those folks have never been to an auto auction. Today we had over 95 dealers doing the same thing over and over again. Looking at a vehicle. Bidding it up to the nether-regions. Hoping that profit will come back via retail or buy here pay-here. Carmax has cutthroat middle-fingered competition at their dealer auctions and the prices reflect the screwing mentality that will likely be passed onto the bad credit consumer.



Wanna buy a Hummer? You can buy them as cheap as dirt these days. There was a beautiful one that went through the block at a weekly public auction in Oakwood, GA. Nice leather interior. Well kept. The H2 models in particular were an easy piece to market and sell not too long ago… but not last Thusday. It no-saled. Not even the hope of a bid at $13k. Then came the H3. No sale at 10k. No takers. Only two no-sales from new car stores that generally sell everything. Why?