Well with the tariffs announced maybe used prices will jump again. Repair costs will now be another consideration!

 

Most depreciation curves are very steep the first year and become much more gradual after several years. All these people surprised by how steep depreciation in the first year or two really need to consider holding onto your vehicles a bit or even a lot longer if the depreciation bothers you. Average annual depreciation over a five to ten year period will be far less than first year depreciation every time. Keep a car twenty years and your average annual depreciation drops dramatically. Same reason leasing every two years is the most expensive way to drive.

 

Since I'm about to buy something I'll give everyone a real world example. The 2016 LR4 I'm buying was $62,495 MSRP in 2016. I'm paying $15,000 retail for it in a few days. NADA avg wholesale price for it is $7500. So if you try to trade anytime soon you're way underwater.

You can hang on to them for a long time but trading in will always be peanuts because the dealerships want to make solid money on trades, that's the gravy train, they either will want to flip it if it's a used car dealer for the 15k minus tires, brakes and whatever else it needs to get it out the door inspected with no warning lights on the dash or if it's something they wouldn't put on the lot anyway like my local JLR dealer would never put this on the lot even though it looks pretty much immaculate, they'd send it straight to auction and nobody can send anything to auction without getting hurt unless they only give you 8k for it.

For a $90,000 Defender after 9 years we can ballpark it based upon the above, 15,000 divided by 62,495 retail will be 24% of sticker = $21,601, that's what a dealership will be selling it for. What they offer you is likely to be about 7,000 less, so you might get 15k or thereabouts on a trade-in. It varies widely based upon mileage of course, because a diamond in the rough low mileage luxury vehicle can make a pretty big difference in the retail pricing. They start to get hard to find with low mileage.

That's why private sale is really the only good way to go for older stuff but even then people either (A) are very wary of being scammed or (B) they can't secure financing as easily as they can from a dealership or (C) they have a trade-in besides. So private sale is the way to go to as a seller in order to get close to retail but you really do have to find the right type of buyer. I'm attempting to sell a car privately right now and it's crickets so far. I'm not in a huge hurry but we'll see how it goes, I haven't attempted to sell a vehicle privately in nearly 30 years.

 

Private sale on expensive SUV is tricky, one guy I know was trying to unload 6 year old G-class, got basically carjacked .

 

Ouch. Yea I would rather use carmax if it's 6 years, I think their limits for resale in-house are 10 years and under 130k miles. They'll make anyone an offer on any old thing but if it's something they can't resell in-house they come back with dirt cheap offers. There's a service called caramel I'm going to try to leverage for making the private sale. They essentially hold the money in escrow between the buyer and seller. If I do end up selling it privately that way I'll let you folks know how the process goes.

 

If you can stomach the stench of dealing with them, I've read that Carvana offers the highest buy offers (or trade in).

Would never buy from Carvana, but if they're willing to pay more for a used car, I'm all about that.

 

I've sold two cars to Carvana and both experiences were great, in one case they offered substantially more than my local dealer was as a trade-in.

I also purchased a car from them, was pleased but then found one locally that was a better fit. Returned it within the 7 day period with zero hassle.

It's worth looking into, as is Vroom their largest competitor. CarMax has never been a good experience from my POV.

 

When my Macan arrived, the Porsche dealer offered me $31k for my 39k-mile 2017 Discovery HSE Luxury in a highly desirable (and incredibly rare) spec - Aintree Green over Vintage Tan/Ebony. I took it to the JLR dealer to see if they wanted to buy it back and they offered $34k. I kept it for a little longer and ended up selling it to CarMax for $40,500. I could've sold it privately for around $45k, but didn't want it to sit around, and it was taking up too much space. CarMax was incredibly easy to deal with and at the time, offered me by far the most money.

 

This was a recent UK headline: Land Rover tops the residual values chart holding 63% of its original value after five years. Based on a recent report from carwow, Land Rover vehicles hold 63% of the original value, after 5 years from the year it was made. Carwow data reveals what cars hold their value best in 2021, looking at both makes and models. Land Rover tops the chart holding 63% of its original value after five years. The rankings are based on data from carwow’s Sell Your Car service.