webuyanycar.com

Laurence

tali wrote: »

anyone used webuyanycar.com?

Got them to value my VW Golf GTI. Offered me £12,600. Laughable. Took it to a VW dealer and got 14,500.
So, I wouldn't use them. Very professional but I'm not throwing away £1,900....! That's my holiday sorted.

Laurence.

plotv38

I went to We Buy Any Car with my low mileage Suzuki. The online valuation was in response to a detailed description with all (only one) faults described.
The employee turned out to be coming from 80 miles away. Odd. His first info was to say 'I'm no engineer'.
The inspection was interesting - he turned on the engine but checked nothing else and did not open the bonnet. The car is excellent for its age and we only went to this mob because of health problems making a private sale a bit of a drag.
The bodywork 'inspection' consisted mainly of looking at the base of the car, the area where small paint chips might be found - but our car has none....
There were a few hairline scratches near the driver's door lock.
What was the result?
We went back into the office and he went through their computer valuation adjustment process.


We have a complete service history except for one bill from 2013 which we mentioned - so that's an incomplete service history which brought the value right down.


Then the 'scratches and dents' (there are no dents - I was so surprised to hear this that I checked later) were entered into the computer and the value came down again.


He also picked up on the bit of plastic broken from the wing mirror cover - something that was disclosed online and was part of the original valuation.


The end result was a valuation which had started out at 20% below the average value being asked on ebay and elsewhere, and which ended up at £75, which is slightly below scrap value.


We said No.


My conclusion is that for older cars at least, they appear to make no real checks at all, and use the most trivial or even imaginary reasons to bring the value down drastically. As they would have had no idea if my car was good or not (it's excellent), they probably put such older vehicles into an auction and in order to get money back they need to cover the auction minimum fee, hence the amazing drop in the offer value.


Maybe they are a bit better for new cars of high value which they would find attractive.


My recommendation - avoid them like the plague.


Also interesting - on a couple of review sites they receive more or less 100% good reviews (out of a small number of reviews)....odd really. Of course anyone can post a review whether they have actually sold a car to, know about, work for etc the organisation in question.

motorguy

I sold a car yesterday to WBAC.

It was valued online @ £3365, however i didnt mention the wheels needing a refurb or the couple of small marks on it. Rightly or wrongly i thought well they're going to chip me back anyway.

The bloke was friendly enough. Examined the service history first, found the "recommended" service interval and thus concluded even though the car had 7 stamps in 54K miles, it should have had 9 as the car was 9 years old and the recommended interval was 12K / 1 year. Technically quite harsh - however you cant really argue with that sort of logic.

Wheels - he picked up on. Didnt have any issue with that.

He found the couple of stone chips and a parking ding.

All the drive he did was down to the end of the car park in the industrial estate. Never got it further than second gear.

He plugged those into the computer and it came back with a revised price of £3000 with their £49.99 fee taken out already.

I was reasonably happy with that. I think their "expectation" that a 9 year old car is absolutely totally mint is a bit much but the reality is, they use that as a bargaining tool.

5 days for the money transfer - or for £25 extra they'd do the transfer within the hour. Not in a rush so i opted not to.

The previous guy in left in his LandRover Discovery looking very irate so i guess it didnt work out for him.

They seemed to be doing a roaring trade though....

Ultinator

Well I registered here just to say be careful, unless you are desperate then seek other ways.

I had a 2007 Hyundai coupe 2.7 with 60,000 miles.
They offered me £900.
I put it on gumtree as I thought that valuation was way low. After two weeks. I got one reply.
This person drive a long way to buy the car. And I sold it for £2760 (£10 more than asking price as he only had £20 notes!).
I also recently sold my van. I once again valued it on we buy any car - £830.
Well it was on gumtree for 3 days. Had 2 people come see it. Second person took it for £2050.

Please consider your options if you can wait a bit of time !!!!!!!!!!!!!

motorguy

Ultinator wrote: »

Well I registered here just to say be careful, unless you are desperate then seek other ways.

I had a 2007 Hyundai coupe 2.7 with 60,000 miles.
They offered me £900.
I put it on gumtree as I thought that valuation was way low. After two weeks. I got one reply.
This person drive a long way to buy the car. And I sold it for £2760 (£10 more than asking price as he only had £20 notes!).
I also recently sold my van. I once again valued it on we buy any car - £830.
Well it was on gumtree for 3 days. Had 2 people come see it. Second person took it for £2050.

Please consider your options if you can wait a bit of time !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Welcome to MSE!


They should never be anyones first choice for a sale, unless you have overriding reasons why you want rid of the car. If you have options and time then there are other outlets, like - as you say - gumtree, autotrader, etc.


My Clio 197 (notoriously hard to sell) had been advertised for around a month on gumtree and autotrader and I hadn't even had a call, even though I had been periodically dropping the price to try to boost interest. I'd a Merc in mind which happened to be underpriced so because I was able to get a quick sale with WBAC and cash in I was able to go ahead and buy it.


Roll forward a year and we were changing our Nissan 370Z GT - another "slow" car to sell. I plugged the details in to WBAC at they came in around £15,800, so my aim when we were negotiating with the Merc dealer we were buying off was to try to get him up over the £16K mark. The dealer rang around their group and got a bid from their Specialist centre for £18,000, so we sold it to them. Well pleased with that!


Of interest, since we sold them it in August, they put it on for £20,995, then £19,995 and now this month its down to £18,995, so I suspect WBAC were actually not far away with their trade bid in the first place. Not my problem though!!


Cars like your 2.7 v6 coupe, my Clio 197 or the 370Z GT are never going to attract strong bids from them as frankly they don't want them. They "generally" will give reasonable money (though still trade prices) for stuff they know they can sell on / retail easily.

forgotmyname

pawalpav = spammer. Owns eco trader... Maybe get someone to make you a legal website?

pappa_golf

Time is money

I sold my car to WBAC , and lost about 2k , but with the time I saved (or not as I waited a week for the money) I went to an exotic country and saved a whole pack of puppies .

no nuns were cooked for food whilst doing this

WBAC are good !

jogto

Only use if you have time or are desperate. I was very thorough in listing "damage" for online quote but inspection identified additional non existent damage with a further 15,% reduction in offer. Recommend only use them if inspection is very convenient and don't beliieve online valuation.

AlTimian

This thread looks a little old. Anyone have any recent experiences of We Buy Any Car they'd care to share?

Looks like there's plenty of decent alternatives to WBAC these days: https://motorway.co.uk/guides/webuyanycar-alternatives - but I'm not really convinced I'll get more with any of these than if I part exchange (or get it sold privately on Auto Trader).

Recent experiences anyone?

molynda

Recent experience, just sold mine today, offered me £2500 online, agreed on £2k in the end including admin fee. To be honest I think some of the stuff they knock off is a little bit picky but they justify it reasonably well with body shop prices that I didn't think were unreasonable (£45 to fix a lightly scuffed alloy, £100 for couple of small chips repair etc). I think if I stuck it on eBay I might have gotten another £500 before fees but it comes down to time and hassle and unfortunately I didn't have time with this one.

I've sold used cars on eBay, auto trader and partex and this service is easily the quickest with the least hassle but you don't get top dollar and that's the trade off. In summary you should list every minute defect for an accurate valuation online and then it's a pleasant selling experience but if you really need the money then take the time and occasional hassle to sell privately.