Is It Better To Sell Or Scrap Your Car?
25th May, 2017
When it comes to get rid of your car, there are a couple of options available to you. Most of them come under two main categories; will you sell your car, or scrap it? Both can be equally viable courses of action, but it’s important to know the details behind each plan, so you can work out which one is really best for you.
Private Sales Take Time
Selling instead of scrapping your car can be quite lucrative, but you’ve got to be willing to put the time and effort in. As the first step, you’ll need to have a look online at what the going rate is for your car. Be realistic – if it’s not as much as you were hoping for, that might be something it’s best to accept early! Also be aware that people will generally want to negotiate with you. In fact, private sales are one of the few opportunities in life where people get to practice their haggling skills at all, so you might find yourself doing it quite a lot. It does take some concentration and resolve for this – your buyers may well be constantly trying to knock down the price, which can be wearing. It might even be worth bumping up the asking price a bit beforehand, just so that you’re closer to where you want to be when they inevitably try and talk you down.
Remember to have your car checked from the perspective of the buyer. Even with the price knocked down a bit, nobody will want something that’s unclean, or if bits of it don’t work properly. Prepare to roll your sleeves up, and possibly even pour a little bit of money into replacing some parts. It can be surprisingly expensive to privately sell your car!
Scrapping Your Car Is Quick And Easy
On the other hand, scrapping your car is a relatively quick, easy and simple process – especially with us at Scrap Car Network, as our entire business model has been built around making things easiest for you. It’s true that you might not get as much money upfront as you could with a private sale, but you do avoid all the work and expense of painstakingly photographing and advertising your car, as well as saving tons of time organising viewings and test drives with potential buyers.
Scrapping your car also saves you the money that you’d have to spend investing in parts and cleaning to get it to an acceptable standard for many buyers. You may well find that the final profit from scrapping your car would be much the same as it would be to sell it!
If you’re handy enough to have removed or recycled some parts from the car for your own use, then unless you intend to replace them the car should almost certainly be scrapped anyway. Anything less than a whole car usually isn’t safe for the road, and therefore not suitable for private sale.
Which Is Right For You?
To be honest, it really depends on what you’re after from your car. Are you mostly after money for a relatively new vehicle? Or do you think your takings from your trusty old car might be quite limited? At the end of the day, selling your car privately can still be a gamble of sorts – both in terms of profit and the potential buyers.
At Scrap Car Network, you always know what you’re getting. You can get an instant scrap car quote on our website, making it easy to see how much you’ll make from it. We don’t pay you in cash either. Instead we’ll finalise payment via alternative, more transparent methods like BACS transfer, so that you can be sure everything is always above board.
To find out how much your scrap car is worth, simply enter your registration number and postcode in our quote form and get an instant price to scrap your car. You can then compare the price to what you would get selling it second hand.
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