We had just a month to sell our Kia Sorento before we headed off to Spain with our new Towcar – the California Ocean. First job was to invest £150 with Black Diamond Valeting in Budleigh Salterton. They did a brilliant job in bringing the vehicle to a showroom finish. Whilst we have always looked after our cars well, this hasn’t really extended to detailing and polishing but the car did look fantastic afterwards.
Selling
Our first port of call was webuyanycar.com and as expected, they came in with quite a low valuation of £13,700 which would have almost certainly been knocked down at appraisal time.
motorway.co.uk and carwow.co.uk were both indicating a reserve price of around £15k with a possible selling price of slightly more than £15.5k.
We had some issues with the carwow website so went with motorway although by the time we had finished, I think both sites had their a faire share of clunky bits of process.
carwow and motorway are essentially auction sites and the motorway auction happened very quickly (maybe same day or next day) and the car “sold” for just under £16k. After the sale you are at the behest of the purchasing dealer and the communications with our lot were poor. They knew we wanted the car collecting before Christmas but faffed around and said it might be a few weeks into January and then went quiet. motorway weren’t very proactive and within 3 working days it was clear this was going nowhere.
The purchasing dealer was I think a Citroen dealer and the purchase didn’t seem to fit their website profile. My theory is that they had someone asking about a Sorento, won my auction and were then waiting for a customer deposit before actually completing the deal.
We then moved onto carwow and the listing and interaction with the carwow business was much more professional. Essentially the same kind of process, the winning bidder turned out to be a big car supermarket, Carbase, a selling price again for just shy of £16k. We had a hiccup with the collection which this time was genuinely delayed by the Christmas holidays but the first guy from the ecomotive logistics company didn’t show. ecomotive knew the deadlines but seemed unwilling to make a real effort to find a replacement.
After escalating, finally they found someone to collect the next morning – our departure date for Portsmouth – Santander. The chap who did turn up from ecomotive was thorough, fair and very nice guy. He reported his findings to Carbase and a few minutes later the £16k was in my account without any haggling. The logistics guy did say that carbase like to buy quality used cars and he felt they would not be disappointed with my Kia Sorento. I agreed with him wholeheartedly!
As I think I stated earlier, one is at the behest of the purchasing dealer but in my limited experience, carwow were much the better company to deal with. webuyanycar were just to low with the pricing.
The Kia Sorento is now up for sale at Carbase for £19.5k and given they’ll inevitable have to move on the price etc, I’m pleased with the outcome.