But to let cars

monsoon1208

I wasn't really sure where to post this question.
Has anyone seen this?
I keep receiving invitations to buy to let cars and I'm not sure if it's a good idea. Invest around £14,000 and get £250 a month return. Sounds too good to be true and therefore probably is.
Does anyone have any experience of this?

badger09

monsoon1208 wrote: »

I wasn't really sure where to post this question.
Has anyone seen this?
I keep receiving invitations to buy to let cars and I'm not sure if it's a good idea. Invest around £14,000 and get £250 a month return. Sounds too good to be true and therefore probably is.
Does anyone have any experience of this?

Very true.

The fact that you 'keep receiving invitations' should ring sufficient alarm bells.

At best its an unregulated investment.

At worst its a scam.

No personal experience, for obvious reasons:cool:

MEM62

monsoon1208 wrote: »

Invest around £14,000 and get £250 a month return.

You are being offered a 21%. If you think this is genuine then go for it. Personally, it screams scam to me.

Superscrooge

I've just done a Google search and found the following.

An ASA ruling where their ad was found to breach advertising standard guidelines and they have been told they must not broadcast the ad again

https://www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/2015/8/Buy-2-Let-Cars-Ltd/SHP_ADJ_302506.aspx#.VnbwG_mLQdV

An article in the Guardian where the recommendation was 'Don't Invest'

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/sep/05/buy-let-cars-returns

These unregulated investments whether they be airport parking plots, storage pods, ostrich farms etc. always seem to turn out to be outright scams or at the very least greatly exaggerate the likely investment returns.

saver861

monsoon1208 wrote: »

I wasn't really sure where to post this question.
Has anyone seen this?
I keep receiving invitations to buy to let cars and I'm not sure if it's a good idea. Invest around £14,000 and get £250 a month return. Sounds too good to be true and therefore probably is.

Yeah - as always - they usually are. If you can give someone £14,000 and have your money back in around 4 years and then continue to get £3000 per year .... hmmm

monsoon1208 wrote: »

Does anyone have any experience of this?

Nope ... and I expect anyone who does will say it was a bad experience!!!

bigfreddiel

Your title says it all 'But to let....' Or Not to let, that is the question.

Think of it like this, if someone you didn't know said he had a red hot certain on the 2:15 at Newmarket, bet £10k, would you?

Cheers fj

jimjames

Or another way.

If a stranger came up to you in the street and asked to borrow £14,000 and said he guaranteed he'd pay you back in a year's time, would you lend the money?

If not (and I certainly wouldn't) why would you hand over money to this crowd?

Aretnap

As a general observation, an obvious difference between a button let car and a buy to let house is that a new ca is guaranteed to lose a lot of value very quickly. Letting it out at a return of (say) 10% for three years doesn't do you a lot of good if it halves in value over the same period. So you would need a very high rental return just to offset the loss in value, let alone the risk that the lessee will default on payments, that the car will be stolen or written off etc. Obviously it is possible to make money by leasing cars, as evidenced by the fact that lease companies exist, but the real return on investment will inevitably be much lower than the headline rental yield would suggest.

The people touting these "investment opportunities" seem to be claiming to have found a way round these probems, and to be so confident in their success that they can guarantee your rental payments even if the lessee doesn't pay, and guarantee you a resale price after 3 years well in excess of the normal resale prices of these cars. You have to ask if they're so confident that they've got it cracked, why not just buy and lease the cars themselves? Why take your money and give all the returns to you when they could just use their own money or borrow it from a bank and keep the profits. Maybe they're not actually confident enough to risk their own money. That should tell you something.

The other thing to remember is that while they may "guarantee" your return, a guarantee is only as good as the person who is offering it. If it's being offered by the Bank of England or the UK government you can probably be reasonably confident in it (though note that in the world of regulated investments even people selling government bonds aren't allowed to call their returns guaranteed). If the person guaranteeing your return is (not to put too fine a point on it) a used car salesman... well, good luck, you'll need it.

The business model of offering unregulated investments with fantastically high "guaranteed" returns has been done plenty of times with storage pods, airport parking spaces etc and tends to end badly. If the people behind an unregulated investment scheme use your money to pay themselves big salaries for a few years, then say "oops, that didn't work as well as we hoped, money's all gone" and declare the company insolvent when the time comes to pay you back, you are left with no money and very little comeback. Don't touch them with a barge pole unless you have a very good understanding of what you're investing in (which means not having to ask about them on an Internet forum).