My No Reserve Focus RS on BaT

No real risk of wrong tires here -- the car was sold with both summer and winter tires.  Entire maintainance history from new, with all records scanned including used oil analysis was included here.  It just wasn't enough for the BaT crowd.

Berck said:

No real risk of wrong tires here -- the car was sold with both summer and winter tires.  Entire maintainance history from new, with all records scanned including used oil analysis was included here.  It just wasn't enough for the BaT crowd.

I only glanced at the comps on BaT, but it didn't seem that far off for the miles. Ones with half the miles were in the mid-20s. Admittedly, there are many other variables, but mileage and model year are the two biggies. 

The one that went for $24.5k was significantly modified, had at least one cracked interior panel and had no real service records and some vague explanations to attempt square the Carfax service history with what actually happened.  And a seller that was unavailable for the last 6 hours.  But even that one going so cheaply should have been a bigger warning flag for me than it was.  

The bigger penalty for me over the monetary one was just the time and hassle.  For those who haven't done it before, I wanted to highlight that this is a long, time-consuming, and at least for me, an extremely stressful way to sell a car.  

The financial penalty here wasn't as minor as it might look at first glance.  While my trade-in offer was $21,500 and the sales price was only $300 below that, I also:

(1) Missed out on $620 tax savings had I traded it in.

(2) Spent $600 replacing tires that the dealer didn't care about.

(3) Spent ~$100 changing the oil with the required Motorcraft oil.

(4) Spent ~$100 insuring the car for an extra 1.5 months.

(5) Whatever I could have sold the extra set of wheels with winter tires on them for..  $500?

Easily a >$2k mistake on my part, but what I really want back are the hours spent in the effort.  It does feel good that the car is going to someone that wants it, and my time sink isn't over yet...  Because I'm sucker, I agreed to meet the buyer with the car at the Denver airport, which is another 5 hours of driving for me.

All of this whining is shared mostly for the benefit of someone thinking about selling a similar car on Bring a Trailer who might stumble upon this post.

Miles matter a LOT though. Here's some data I put together when selling my E91. Yellow dots were actual sales of the same model year, rwd, manual. Gray dots are my plus or minus error bars. I did not consider condition, color, or season. Green shows where I predicted mine and where it landed. I was extremely happy with my math, haha. The difference in value between 75,000 miles and 100,000 miles is a drop from $20k to $15k on average, all else the same for this car. So while both 75k and 100k miles are pretty close, the value falloff is steep at this range. BaT is especially sensitive to miles since you get so many low-miles examples. 

I say all this with the same intent as what you are saying - help other know what they are getting into. My math convinced me that I had a good chance of selling my car for a good amount, so I had an idea of how much work I wanted to put into it. Glancing at Focus RSs on there, you could not have done the math to accurately predict selling price since I had a ton more data available for me than you did, so please don't take my statements as "here's what you should have done". Rather, I only sold for no reserve because I had enough data to predict the sale price - my caution to others would be to only go NR if you are confident in the market for your car and have the data to back up that confidence.

I think this statement is in line with your statements. 

I wonder if the car would have done better on Cars and Bids. I feel like their inventory skews a bit more towards well cared for enthusiast cars, not diaper rubbed garage queens.

Sorry if a little OT, but I am glad I caught this thread before attempting anything on BaT. I have fallen off the planet with these things (after I had children).

Thanks all for sharing your experiences.

dyintorace said:

I wonder if the car would have done better on Cars and Bids. I feel like their inventory skews a bit more towards well cared for enthusiast cars, not diaper rubbed garage queens.

The only time I ever think of Cars and Bids is when I'm reading something about Bring A Trailer and someone mentions Cars and Bids as an alternative.

If I'm thinking about an old car, Cars and Bids doesn't even cross my mind. I certainly wouldn't want to list my car with no reserve on there. 

In reply to Woody (Forum Supportum) :

Some cars do well though. In my example above with my E91, I used BaT data to build my price estimation, but I sold on Cars and Bids for dead-on what I estimated from BaT. I also advertised that car both on here and on the E90 forum. At least three bidders came from the forum that I knew of. 

BaT is weird, the assumption is everything on there sells for crazy money, but that hasn't been my experience.  I echo your thoughts on getting good copy, it was hard to get them to write the ad for my corrado correctly and to highlight the fact it went through a complete mechanical restoration.  They just weren't interested in putting that in there, which is pretty huge when trying to sell a 30 year old VW.  As you pointed out, you have very little control on when they list it and when it's going to end.

Based on my research, my car should've sold for at least 20% more and potentially 30-40% more than it did.  It barely sold for over reserve, which didn't make me all that happy.  The sale process was easy, the buyer contracted shipping through BaT and it was picked up and gone.

Even super nice cars can still underperform on BaT.  My good friend sold his low miles 993 C4S there, arena red with black leather and it sold for almost $20k less than he expected.

You do have to spend a lot of time baby sitting the auction, posting more pics, videos, answering questions etc.  That wasn't too much of my time, what I didn't like was 6+ people asked to come see the car while the auction was live.  I spent *hours* with these people and not a single one of them ended up bidding on the car.  I was hoping an auction like that would eliminate the tire kickers, but nope....

For what it's worth, I tend to avoid cars with any mention of snow tires. As somebody who lives where it doesn't snow, cars that have seen it scare me between rust/sandblasting/sliding into curbs/etc. 

I'm not saying this is a reasonable fear, but it's real. 

In reply to Tom Suddard :

I think it's a reasonable fear.  I think the under carriage photos showing exactly zero rust helps alleviate some of those fears.  This car was expressly purchased to drive in the snow, and I wouldn't have hidden that fact even if I didn't sell it with snow tires.  If I didnt need to deal with serious snow in the Colorado mountains, I wouldn't have bothered buying a fun AWD car in the first place!  Colorado is not like the rust belt--it takes a lot of time for anything to rust out here.  The roads aren't generally salted here, though there is a fair amount of mag chloride in town.  A car wash subscription helps.

I considered including this photo in the BaT listing.

Ok, that rules.

I used to write copy for BAT back before the auction days. They paid between $20 and $40 a listing for the copy and required it to sound just like all their other copy, and most of it was done by a handful of writers. No real editing was done that I remember.  No idea what they are paying copy writers now but it ain't enough in my opinion, based on the stuff you read on there. 

It takes a lot of time and effort to write decent copy. LLMs might improve some of their copy but I would not trust them at all to get any facts right. 

In reply to Erich :

I remember the non-auction copy would always mention the stance of the car. It was a running joke between a friend and I :)

The current batch of auction copywriters can have a little trouble with the facts as well. They definitely rely on the seller to fact-check things.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

The copy is said to have been written by amateurs.  Passive voice is often noticed to be in use, with odd phrasing. 

Stance is an annoyance of mine as well. I don't think I ever mentioned it in my submissions. The pay was pretty paltry considering you were usually expected to find the cars, write them up, and put them into their system yourself. I did it for fun and to help fund some bicycle projects at the time.

In reply to Erich :

You've still got it :)

The BaT ad copy is really off-putting.  My friends have had decent experiences over they years but one friend recently used Cars&Bids for his MB E63S wagon (brown!) and another decided to have a consignment guy handle his '79 512 rather than deal with BaT.  I bet the serial listers get better service.

@berck, you won't want to hear this but I suspect the tone you took in some of your responses hurt the outcome.  Also, buying 2 tires instead of 4 (no matter how rational) hints of 'cheap owner'.   I know BaT brings out the d*cks but they were right that you should have had a cold start video from the go.  Whether right or not, that's just the way it is.

I don't disagree.  I admitted that a more competent (affable?) seller probably could have done better than me.  If a cold start video is de facto required, it  would have been nice if BaT requested it, or someone requested it before the last minute.  As a buyer, it wouldn't have mattered to me at all--a cold start is just not a thing that's an issue in a modern vehicle.  I almost never click on the videos when looking as a buyer, so I glossed over the fact that they all have them now.  They certainly didn't used to.

I definitely lost my cool at the suggestion that I'd ruined the car by buying running 2 new tires.  I'm certain that someone with a bit more tact could have handled the situation much better than I did.  I hope that guy sells another car on BaT, because boy am I going to have some questions for him.

Part of me wonders how often the nit-picky buyers are just trying to lower the price for themselves.

Berck said:

Part of me wonders how often the nit-picky buyers are just trying to lower the price for themselves.

You can click on their profile and see if they ever bid on anything or just like to be a keyboard warrior.

In reply to Berck :

I was watching it, and a simple Google search for me found that Focus RS supplemental manual says any combination of new or worn tires of same original tire size can be used.

Online auctions are hit or miss. I'd expect $22-24k private party on yours based on the prices I've seen, so probably wasn't worth the risk over $22k for dealer trade-in. Also I think if you washed the dirt off the underside, it would have helped a bit. I don't think the Focus RS is a super hot seller on BaT or C&B compared to the private party/dealership market.

I haven't won anything on online auctions yet, but my dad got a great deal on a C6Z06 on BaT since it was modified and had some miles. I think it sold for like $10k less than he had it listed private party.