Car retention fee (buyback after write off)

Dizzy078

Hello,


My car has been written off by the insurers after a non fault accident. Other party has accepted fault so all good there. The claim has gone through my own insurers and they have messed me about loads to this point, almost scrapping my car without permission, among other things.


They have offered me a settlement for the car which I'm happy with, £4587 for a bmw 5 series m sport, 2007, 114k miles.


What I'm not happy with is the £1146.75 retention fee they wish to deduct. They've put in their email this is non-negotiable. I've replied asking them to explain why the fee is so high, when I was due to receive a cheque from a salvage company for £489.50 for them accepting my scrapped car.


Is there any way to make them budge on this fee? Am I being overcharged here? I cannot see why it's so high when they were willing to give it to the salvage company for under half the price.

sal_III

It's 25% of the payout I believe that's fixed and more or less in line with most insurers.

What has the scrap value have to do here? Obviously you put more value in the car than it's scrap value or you wouldn't bother with retaining it.

Jumblebumble

sal_III wrote: »

It's 25% of the payout I believe that's fixed and more or less in line with most insurers.

What has the scrap value have to do here? Obviously you put more value in the car than it's scrap value or you wouldn't bother with retaining it.

In the days when I was involved with this kind of thing the insurance companies had a deal whereby fixed percentage of book price that was paid to them by the Salvage yards for all cars

This meant that sometimes the yards would spend £10K on a car worth 25K and sometimes spend £10k on a crushed burned out pile of valueless junk.
I imagine this is what is happening here and there is no reason why the insurance would let you have it at a penny below their underwritten price from their preferred yard
What you can get from someone who not part of this type of deal is irrelevant as the car is not actually available to be sold to them.