Private sale, part-exchange or a buying service: an honest comparison
Three routes, each with a real cost. Written by one of the three, which is a reason to read it sceptically and a reason we have been careful.
· 6 min read
We are a car buying service, so treat this the way you would treat any comparison written by one of the parties in it. What we can do is be accurate about the trade-offs, including ours, and let you decide which cost you would rather pay.
Because that is what this actually is. Every route costs you something. The question is whether it costs you money, time, or risk, and which of those you have most of.
The short version
| Private sale | Part-exchange | Buying service | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical price achieved | Highest | Lowest | Between the two |
| Time and effort | Weeks, all yours | Almost none | A day or two |
| Certainty of completing | Low until it happens | High | High |
| Strangers at your home | Yes | No | Collection only |
| Payment risk | Yours to manage | None | None if paid before collection |
| Works best when | You have time and patience | You are buying another car anyway | You want it done properly and quickly |
Now the detail, including where each one is worse than it sounds.
Private sale
The case for it is real. You will usually achieve the highest headline figure, because you are selling to the person who will actually drive the car rather than to somebody who needs to sell it on afterwards at a profit. On a desirable car in good condition, that gap can be meaningful.
What it costs you is not money. It is weeks of your life, and a category of risk most people underestimate until they are in it.
You will field messages from people who are not going to buy. You will arrange viewings that do not happen. You will have strangers at your home address, and you will hand your keys to people you have never met so they can drive your car on a test drive, insured or otherwise.
Then there is payment. This is the part that goes wrong. You are being asked to hand over a car worth tens of thousands of pounds in exchange for a transfer you cannot fully verify has cleared, to someone standing in your driveway who would like to leave. Bank transfers can be reversed. Banker's drafts can be forged. The pressure to just get it done is exactly the condition fraud relies on.
None of that makes private sale wrong. Plenty of people do it and are pleased they did. It makes it a route that costs time and attention rather than money, and you should choose it knowing that is the trade.
Choose it if: you have time, patience, somewhere safe to meet, and a car that will appeal to a private buyer.
Part-exchange
The case for it is convenience, and convenience is worth something. One appointment, one conversation, one set of paperwork. You arrive in the old car and leave in the new one. For a lot of people that is genuinely the right answer, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
What it costs you is money, and the structure hides it. The dealer is doing two deals with you at once — selling you a car and buying one — and only one number is visible at a time. A generous-looking trade-in figure can be funded by a smaller discount on the car you are buying. A large discount can be funded by a modest trade-in. It is very difficult to tell which is happening, because you are negotiating two prices as though they were one.
The way to see through it is to establish both numbers separately. Find out what the dealer will discount the new car by if you bring no trade-in at all. Then find out what your current car is worth to a buyer who is not selling you anything. Now you can see both halves, and you can judge whether the combined deal is good.
You may still part-exchange after doing that. But you will do it knowing the number.
Choose it if: you are buying from that dealer anyway, you value the simplicity, and you have checked both halves of the deal separately.
A buying service, including us
The case for it is certainty and speed. You get a figure, the car is collected, you are paid. No listings, no strangers, no payment risk, and it is finished in days rather than weeks.
What it costs you is the margin. We are buying your car to sell it again. That is our business, it has to work, and the gap between what we pay you and what the car eventually makes is where our money comes from. Anyone in this category who implies otherwise is being slippery with you.
And here is the part of this category you should be most careful about. The standard complaint is not about the margin, it is about the number changing. An attractive figure online, a drive to a retail park, an inspection, and a smaller number offered when you have already committed your afternoon and mentally sold the car. That practice is common enough that many sellers now assume it is simply how the industry works.
It is not how we work — our offers stand for seven days and do not change on collection — but you have no reason to take that on faith from a company's own website. So test it. Ask any buying service, us included, the same two questions: is that figure what you will actually pay when you see the car, and what would have to be true for it to change? A firm answer to both is the thing to look for.
Choose it if: you want it done quickly and cleanly, and you would rather pay a margin than spend three weekends on it.
What we would actually tell a friend
If you have plenty of time, a car that private buyers want, and no anxiety about handling a large payment — sell it privately. You will do better.
If you are standing in a showroom buying something else and the convenience is worth real money to you — part-exchange, but find out both numbers first.
If you want it dealt with properly, quickly, and without any part of it landing on you — use a buying service, and get more than one offer.
That last point is the one we would emphasise most, and it is the one that occasionally costs us a purchase. A seller who has three offers in front of them knows what a good number looks like. A seller with one offer is guessing. We would rather compete against the other offers than against your uncertainty, because when the comparison is properly informed we tend to do well on the cars we actually want — which we are specific about, and which we explain in why our offers on certain cars are stronger.
If your car is one of those, the Range Rover, Defender and Lexus pages set out what we look for. And if there is finance outstanding, that changes nothing about which route suits you, though it does add steps — we have written up how settlement actually works separately.
When you want a number to compare against the others, we will give you a firm one within two hours. It stands for seven days, and it does not move when we arrive.
