There are several reasons why selling your vehicle to a local dealership is a better, more convenient option for most car sellers in Baltimore, Washington D.C. and Maryland:

• It’s straightforward and nearby
• You might have an existing relationship with the dealership
• You don’t have to deal with the logistics of selling a car online
• You’ll be working with a registered business that use properly secured transactions

Trust and Reputation

It’s not in any dealership’s interest to take advantage of people selling their cars. Local dealerships have a reputation to uphold, and they want you to come back to them the next time you want to buy or sell a vehicle.

If a dealership takes advantage of you, treats you poorly or gives you a bad deal, they are essentially losing a customer forever. That customer could also tell their friends about a dealership’s bad behavior or vent about their treatment online. Any dealership that wants to maintain a good reputation must treat customers fairly. Loyalty doesn’t matter to online marketplaces. They might have hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers worldwide – losing your business or getting one bad review doesn’t mean anything to them.

Do You Know How to Sell a Car on an Online Marketplace?

Unless you’ve already researched or gone through the process of selling a car online you might not have any idea how it works. Selling a car to a dealership is simple and intuitive:

1. Get an offer
2. Drive the car to the lot
3. Exchange your keys for a stack of bills or a check

To sell your car on an online marketplace, you usually have to:

1. Download an app, make an account and figure out how to use it (you’ll also likely get spam emails for the foreseeable future)
2. Take lots of pictures of your vehicle, inside and out and from all angles
3. Go through the process of filling out all your vehicles information
4. Write a report on your vehicle’s condition, history and warranty
5. Enter the price YOU want
6. Decide where and how your vehicle will be listed in the marketplace
7. Depending on the marketplace you may need to meet prospective buyers for test drives or inspections
8. Once it sells you have to get it to the buyer  

Some online marketplaces are also hotbeds of scam artists and creeps.

There’s no guarantee someone you meet from Craigslist is going to be safe. You can maybe report scammers and dangerous people to the platform, but the offenders can just make a new account and keep doing what they’re doing.

Some of the better online marketplaces will come pick your car up when you sell it. These higher-end platforms take extra steps on their end to make the process less cumbersome for car sellers, but in many of those cases the marketplace ends up taking a bigger cut of the sale since they’re putting in so much of the work.

Local dealerships are easy to use, and you have an opportunity to negotiate and exert more agency over the process.

Peace of Mind and Security

Meeting up with random strangers for a car inspection, test drive or to exchange your car for cash can be dangerous and unpredictable. Handshake deals and cash exchanges aren’t exactly secured. There’s little to no recourse if the check they give you bounces, or if you’re the buyer and you find out the title isn’t clear when a repo man tows your new car off.

A lot of car buyers also want some kind of guarantee of reliability and quality. They’ll want to see Carfax or some other kind of preowned certification or warranty. If you’re selling on a marketplace or you’re just listing your car on Craigslist or a similar website, any warranties or certifications you offer will have to be done by you.

In many cases certified preowned vehicle warranties are transferable, but the new owner will need to let the manufacturer know the vehicle has changed hands. A lot of automakers charge extra fees for warranty transfers.

If maintaining the certified preowned warranty is important to you or you’re using it as a selling point, you should look into the transferability of the warranty. Some automakers have special rules that may or may not invalidate warranties if you sell a certified preowned vehicle.

Avoid the Headache

Whether selling your car on an online marketplace will net you more or less money is debatable. Chances are any difference will be negligible, especially now when preowned vehicles are selling for record high amounts.

If you want to get a great price on your vehicle sale, call Easterns Automotive at (877) 867-4212. We’ve created an easy process that allows you to sell us your car for cash way more quickly and easily than any online marketplace. We can give you an offer in three hours and you can finalize the deal right afterwards. No meeting prospective buyers for test drives in parking lots, no need to create a picture gallery of your vehicle and no paranoia about whether or not you’re getting a fair deal.

Let Easterns Automotive make your car sale easy – call or visit one of our lots today!

Yes – at least at Easterns Automotive Group. You can sell us your car for cash without buying a different one from our lot. Whether a dealership will buy your vehicle outright – and what they’re willing to pay – is highly dependent on the dealership.

Some dealerships may be less likely to take some vehicles. A dealership that just sells sports cars or luxury brands may not be at all interested in purchasing a 2005 Toyota Camry or a 2003 Jeep, even if your vehicle still has a lot of miles left in it.

At Easterns Automotive, we’re not brand, year or model elitists. Even if your car has problems, we may still be able to work something out so you can at least get some cash or at the very least credit towards a new vehicle.

Car owners in Baltimore, Washington D.C. or anywhere in Maryland that want to sell their car, truck or SUV should fill out the vehicle sales form on our website – we’ll send you an offer within three business hours.

Why Are Used Cars in Such High Demand in 2021?

Every auto sales expert seems to be in agreement – there’s a serious car shortage in 2021. The shortage has increased the valuation of preowned vehicles by quite a bit, which is good news for people who want to sell their used vehicle for cash or as a trade-in.

In March, Edmunds found that the average trade-in was being valued at $17,080, a 21 percent increase from March 2020. The average preowned vehicle sales price was at $25,463 in April, roughly $2,800 more than the average price in April 2020. According to J.D. Power, the April 2021 average used car price went over $25,000 for the first time in history. 

What’s Causing Used Car Prices to Go Up?

It’s a bit counterintuitive, but one of the main reasons for the increased price of preowned vehicles is a shortage of chips for new cars. The difficulty manufacturers are having getting enough chips has resulted in fewer new cars being made, meaning a lot of dealerships have fewer new cars in their inventories.

The pandemic also caused the temporary shutdown of many car manufacturing factories, which meant many companies lost at least two months of production in 2020.

Analysts and dealership experts also suspect leasers are deciding to hang on to their leased cars, trucks and SUVs longer than normal, which has meant fewer previously leased vehicles are entering the used car market.

Another interesting pandemic-related reason for the new and preowned car shortage has to do with rental car services. One of the biggest sources of preowned vehicles for sale are rental car companies that sell off their “old” rental cars.

Rental car companies usually keep their vehicles for between four and 22 months, which means they represent a frequent infusion of used cars into the preowned vehicle market. During the pandemic, when very few people were actually traveling and renting vehicles, those rental car companies had no reason to purchase new vehicles. That means the 2020 rental vehicles that should be entering the 2021 used car market aren’t materializing.

The scarcity of new vehicles has also changed the way rental agencies are purchasing vehicles, with many opting to hold onto vehicles longer rather than overpaying for scarce new vehicles. Companies like Hertz and Enterprise have actually begun purchasing preowned vehicles when it becomes necessary to replace vehicles in their fleet, which is a pretty rare move for the rental car industry.

While those complications have, in most cases, been a negative for new car manufacturers and dealerships, they have resulted in a significant increase in preowned vehicle sales. TrueCar estimates that 3.4 million used vehicles were sold in the U.S. in April 2021, which is a 58 percent increase over April 2020. The increase in used vehicle popularity has further stressed the supply of available preowned vehicles. Dealerships had about 18 percent fewer used vehicles available for sale at the start of April 2021 than they had in April 2020.

Why Does This Matter if I Want to Sell My Vehicle?

The current scarcity of both new and preowned vehicles has resulted in an increase in the valuation of used cars, trucks and SUVs.

To put it simply, 2021 will be a historically good year for anyone selling their vehicle, since valuations on preowned cars are likely to stay high until the chip shortage is over and the supply of new vehicles begins to normalize.

If you want to take advantage of this opportunity and sell your vehicle, call Easterns Automotive at (877) 867-4212. We’re always happy to accept preowned vehicles for trade-in or cash – whichever you prefer.