You’ve saved and you’re now finally in a stable enough financial position to retire your old used car and get a brand new one. However, the last thing you want to do is to go down to your local car dealership and try to engage in a battle of wits with any number of car salesmen, and you’re probably feeling pretty upset at not being able to get a brand new car in any other way.
Well, you’ll be glad to know that there are alternatives to dealing with the dealership. One of the best and most overlooked options for finding new cars to buy is to get a new car from an auction. It’s one of the best-kept secrets of the auto industry, and it’s one that car dealers guard closely – because if everyone knew, they’d be out of business. Here’s how to gain access to these affordably-priced, brand new vehicles in just a few easy steps.
Know Where to Look
Most people think of used cars when it comes to car auctions. This is because the majority of car auctions that are open to the public deal almost exclusively with used cars. These vehicles are typically just off lease, salvage vehicles waiting to be rebuilt, or even cars and trucks impounded in state and federal law enforcement actions.
You can get some excellent prices on these vehicles, but you never know what you’re going to get with a used car – they’re often sold “as is”. This means that that very low price you got for a car that looked good but turned out to have some problems might not save you that much money after all.
Meanwhile, if you want to find out where all the new cars are being sold, you need to find a private auction. They’re not necessarily such a big secret – they’re just not open to the public because attendees at these auctions need to have their own dealer license.
Anyone who sells more than a car or two a year – from the owner of a massive used or new car lot to a little mom-and-pop auto body garage that buys salvage cars and rebuilds them to resell – will have a dealer license, and they often will make a few trips every year to local dealer auctions in search of cars they can turn around and sell at a profit.
How to Get In
It’s not nearly as hard as you might think to get into one of these private auctions. If you want to attend in person, you’ll need to go in the company of someone who has their own dealer license. This isn’t a loophole. If a dealer plans on buying a vehicle or two at an auction, they’ll bring along “drivers” that will actually drive the vehicle back to the dealer lot for them.
If you have a friend or a family member that has a license, and they’re willing to take you with them in exchange for letting them bid with your hard-earned money, then you can go along and experience the controlled chaos of a car auction in person.
If you’re nowhere near the physical location of an auction or if you don’t know anyone with their own dealer license, all is not lost. Many of these dealer auctions have their own websites where they will let dealers bid over the Internet instead of having to be physically present at an auction.
While you still need a dealer license to bid on these vehicles, there are companies that specialize in acting as bidders on behalf of those without licenses. These companies, which have dealer licenses of their own, offer third-party auction services so non-dealers can have access to certain dealer auctions and look through the inventory and place bids on cars coming up on the auction block.
These third-party proxy sites usually offer a host of services associated with dealer auctions. For a fee, they will transport your brand new car from the physical auction site to your home address. For an even bigger fee, they may even be able to transport your new car overseas, while also handling all the necessary customs paperwork to boot.
All you’ll need to do is to pay the import duty taxes and any other fees associated with exporting a car to a particular country, and you can just pick it up after it’s unloaded from the container ship that brought it across the ocean.
Explore our Vehicle Auctions, as well as finding more information about How These Auctions Work.
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