What happens to invoke a "rebuilt" Title?

This Ridgeline is $10k under book.  Am I shooting myself in the foot by even looking?  Of course the seller is going to down play the damage of cause for the rebuild, and the reasons may vary State to State, but ......

I would want pictures of the damage before the repair and a list of what was done. 

Edit to say: A RI rebuilt may be flood damage. If so, I'd run far and fast considering all the electronics in cars these days. 

I would need receipts. It basically means it was totaled, or the cost to repair was more than the value of the car. Sometimes that is a big deal. Sometimes it means that because of Covid, the parts were not available for a reasonable price and it got totaled for something minor. Were body panels replaced or just repaired? Was there any frame damage? Get underneath and start looking for rust. 

I'd be curious when the repairs happened - if they happened 4 years ago and 15k miles ago, I'd feel better about it than if they happened 4 weeks and 15 miles ago. 

It will always be harder to sell. You won't get anything other than liability insurance. So keep that in mind, there is a real financial risk with this. 

Toyman! said:

Edit to say: A RI rebuilt may be flood damage. If so, I'd run far and fast considering all the electronics in cars these days. 

I know someone who buys flood cars. He only buys cars with power seats. If the seats still work like new, he'll then start to investigate every single electronic part inside the car, check all of the fuses (meaning remove all of them and look for any oxidation or muck), reach underneath the dash to look for evidence... If the flood damage was limited to the carpet, no big deal. But if one electronic thing doesn't work right, he'll move on. If it doesn't have electronic seats, he doesn't even consider it. His reasoning is that the seats are the lowest part of the car and likely the first to fail in a flood situation.

I personally wouldn't take the risk on a flood car.

No, no, no flood cars.  My Dad had an Audi A6 with a leaky sunroof (big Audi problem) and it lived outside.  After a few days of rain, the foot wells filled with water.  He brought it inside, mopped it out, ran fans and heaters for weeks until the alarm would go off at 3 am for no reason.   He traded it in.  A lady called one day to ask about the car, and he was honest, I wouldn't buy it.  Lady was buying it for her 18 year old daughter.  "Don't do it".    

She bought it.

Thanks for the input, but I could spend $10,000 fixing the fix, not to mention the stress of reliability and/or being stranded.   PASS.

It varies so widely - both from state to state and from car to car.

My ex wife's Tercel I dragged my feet dropping the comp/collision as it got older and it got caught in a hailstorm.  It damaged every panel, but only very lightly.  I made a claim (knowing that in CA I can reverse that decision) and they totaled it.  The buyback was so cheap that I took it.  Basically they sent me a check for $2500 on a car that was maybe worth $3500 and I kept the car.  An R or S title Tercel with a few hail dents would be a great bet.

Contrast that with a Tercel that was T-boned and fixed in Hector's back yard... not such a great bet.

But here's the thing, and there's really no way around this... because it has an R or S title means that both Tercels are worth the same resale value on the market.  Even if I had pictures of before and after on my Tercel showing just the hail dents, it might be worth something to you.  You might be thinking "cool, cheap car with dents."  Now drive it for a couple years and try to sell it.  You will have limited your buying audience down to a tiny fraction of what it was, and removing all confidence from the remaining buyers.  It will sell for pennies on the dollar, if it sells at all.

Just know you're buying a vehicle that likely won't ever sell for a vaguely realistic price ever again, so pay a price that reflects that.

What this also means is (buyer beware) that there are plenty of vehicles out there that have been physically totaled, but don't have an R or S title because either they didn't want to make a claim or they didn't have full coverage and fixed it themselves.

The short answer to your story is that you can have a branded title from something as little as a few hail dents, or you could have a lemon plucked from the bottom of a cliff and repaired that has a squeaky clean title.

The more general answer is that an R or S title is usually required when an owner makes an insurance claim on damages to their vehicle and it ends up that the repair cost is over about 80% of its value.  It's strictly a financial decision and has no bearing on the soundness of the vehicle.

Pass. New York doesn't honor other state's rebuilt titles so even if it's perfect you're in line for a salvage inspection when you try to register it. 

Rebuilt titles here in Washington state are a crap shoot. They can be issued for having a new motor installed to having a dent repaired on a car. I had a fiat spider with a rebuilt title because the previous owner had a shop install a new top. WTF does putting a new top on a convertible have to do with the safety of the vehicle or the road worthiness. 

To me it's just another way the government is trying to get older cars off the roads. 

Not worth the hassle ever.  I would get a part time job to make up the $10k difference before I tried to cheap out.  

If you have access to Copart or IAA's historical data, you may be able to find photos of it with the VIN.  I don't know if the general public can do that or not.

Anything 'late model' that is popular (like any Honda) I would be very skeptical. There is a reason we total cars in the insurance biz. Mostly monetary, but sometimes we just want an eternal problem to go away. 

In PA, an abandoned vehicle left at a tow yard will get a salvage certificate even if there is nothing really wrong with it, but it's rare anything gets abandoned that isn't over ten years old.

I reached out to the seller asking if he knew what prompted the rebuild, if he had records or photos.  "I bought it rebuilt".  So something bad happened and he has to dump it, he's not happy with the repair or he's a flipper and STILL making money at 1/3 off?  Hard PASS.   -~ (

Not all flood cars are bad.  My baja turbo has that brand.  I suspect the previous(very shady mechanic) owner drove it through a big puddle and locked up the motor.  Then they made an insurance claim and used settlement to fix.  Came with a forester(egr equipped) motor poorly installed and worn out.  All of the electronics work fine and the only smell is old subaru which was purged via a few hours of ozone.  Now it has a freshly rebuilt motor and runs great.  Yes the title thing might affect sale price but I have a beautiful great running car.

In reply to porschenut :

That car was bad regardless of the title or flood though. You had to replace the engine!

It is a completely different equation when the value for a clean version is below $5k. 

A branded-title car is worth money to one person - you.  That's the real thing.  Sales of branded vehicles relies on one major market - a tiny fraction of people who want THAT car and are tempted by the low price.

I wanted a Jag XJR so bad that I considered buying one with a rebuilt title.  What should have been a $12,000 car I could have had for $6800.  In my life, that was a great trade-off because I saw pictures of the rear-end damage and it wasn't bad.

But to anyone else looking in the XJR market, it was worth exactly $0.  There wasn't going to be another buyer like me in the entire world - a cheapskate auto mechanic in the market for a used, obscure car who was so passionate about wanting one that they would pay more than 50 cents for it.  If it's a good deal for you, great, but just know that you'll probably never be able to sell it for more than a few hundred bucks IF it sells at all.  I would just hate for you to get it, not like it or it turns out to be a lemon, and you're stuck with it like a student loan.

The only other salvage title vehicle I had was a ZQ8 Sonoma.  It had been sideswiped and only had cosmetic damage.  I paid $6000 and drove it for two years and used it to move from TX to PA.  You would think a rust-free Sonoma ZQ8 would sell in a day in PA, but it took me 5 months to sell it, it sold for $1500, and I had to deliver it 6 hours to OH to sweeten the deal.  

The only way this works out is if it's a good deal for YOU, you keep it until it turns into dust, and never develop hope that it has any resale value.   The only things I buy that I know will never offer some kind of return on my investment is food and toilet paper.  As long as you view that Ridgeline as 5 figures worth of Charmin, you can't lose.

In reply to mtn :

I bought it for 3500 and drove it for a year.  It ran but the oil consumption was high and I knew what a suby turbo does at 200K.  So fix it on my schedule or its schedule.  Overall happy with my flood car, just sharing a good result.

I once considered a Mitsubishi L-200 pickup with a Kentucky salvage title.  Not wrecked, not flooded, only 1900 miles.  It was confiscated at the border.  How a truck confiscated in Texas ends up in Kentucky, who knows.  I walked away because 1) Ohio didn't want to play nice with the title, 2) that model was never imported into the States so parts and service were a worry and 3) the engine seemed a little anemic to pull the F600 around.

One caveat to all of the above. The last couple years turned the insurance and repair industries on their heads. My wife's Telluride was totaled with significant damage, but it definitely looked repairable for a fraction of what they totaled it for ($42k, almost exactly what we paid for it brand new three years prior.) The problem was parts availability, it was cheaper to total than to deal with months of waiting on parts. My wife got a call from the guy who bought it at auction and rebuilt it. He only paid $10k for it. It had been clipped in the left front, an idiot hit her while he was passing on the wrong side of the road while my wife was turning left. I believe it needed a fender, hood, grill, bumper, headlight, and front suspension components. I'm kicking myself for not checking into buying it back and fixing it. That was a great car. 

My only experience with rebuilt so far is the Subaru BRZ I bought from ¯\_(ツ)_/¯   in 2022 & still love it.  As far as I can tell it got tail-out into something that smooshed the quarter panel and set off nearby airbags.  He checked alignment (good), had the fender fixed and replaced the airbags from the rally car, and sold it to me.  I'm daily-ing it ever since.