With the world at our fingertips now courtesy of the internet it really is quite easy to educate yourself about just about anything. But, just as reading every opinion on real estate can make you quite educated about neighborhoods’ square footage and school districts, signing a deal on the perfect house at the right price is not so easy. In fact, it can be extremely intimidating whether you have done it before or not.
In the online world of cars it is easy to trip over experts on everything from tuning to collecting, from buying to selling and from torque to trunk space but what seems to bind them all together besides their love of things with wheels and engines is an unabashed insistence that they can bring a salesman to his knees, begging for mercy when negotiating for cars. What all of these people often forget, myself included, is that buying a car is a very personal process and asking for help getting the best price on a car is not so simple. Sometimes folks like to pick their own car and figure out how to deal with negotiations on their own.
A recent third party study for Carsala has revealed that in reality, car geeks aside, 73% of used car buyers dislike the negotiating process and a majority of them rate themselves as being poor negotiators. What is shocking is that almost 20% indicated that they had not attempted to negotiate the price of the car that they most recently purchased.
That last sentence just makes me shudder but friends and family are constantly buying cars around me and never ask for my help despite knowing what I do in the car world. At first I would take it personally but then I realized that they were taking their investment in a car personally and wanted to do it themselves. I can tell someone over dinner or the phone which car I think they want because maybe they really do like the Malibu or an X5 and I would try to get them to consider something else comparable or better. They might listen. But what about when they really want help with the act of buying the car and the dreaded negotiation game at the dealership? Unless I have a good several months to help them search the car lots and an entire day to spend at the dealership while the sales guys play their game, I have my own house to clean and job to do so they don’t want to bother me. Fair enough!
Now if only real estate agents representing you actually were like Carsala, we would be moving in the right direction!
How do you feel about the car buying process?
