BCA British Car Auction preferential buyer fees

[AOK]

Hope someone can help,

What saving on the 'Standard Buyers Fee' do you get as you move up through the different tiers of BCA Card membership? Just trying to work out whether its worth applying.

E.g. I know that a Silver BCA Card entitles you to 'Intermediate Fees' and the Gold BCA Card entitles you to 'Business Fees', but what are these in comparison to the Standard Buyer Fee? Are we talking £10 pounds, or 10% or more?

Thanks in advance for any help!

[shimmey69]

I dont know what tiers he has but a friend said if I needed a vehicle at auction put it on his account and I'll save 70% on buyers fees! IIRC

Which is a fair few £££

[spikeyhead]

They are significant, not sure of the exact savings, but to qualify you have to by lots of cars and to keep buying them.

[Small Car]

Very generally, Silver and Gold cards are there or there abouts the same for buyers premium. Something like £200 on a £6k car I recall. You need to buy something like 4 cars to get silver and 12 to get gold in any one year. There is a black or platinum card as well, and it might be something bigger like 40 or 100 cars on that. And since I have never had one of those I don't know the premium costs. With gold you also get cheaper transport. Hope that helps?

[AOK]

Small Car said:

Very generally, Silver and Gold cards are there or there abouts the same for buyers premium. Something like £200 on a £6k car I recall. You need to buy something like 4 cars to get silver and 12 to get gold in any one year. There is a black or platinum card as well, and it might be something bigger like 40 or 100 cars on that. And since I have never had one of those I don't know the premium costs. With gold you also get cheaper transport. Hope that helps?

Very useful, thank you!
So basically, for the £3000 ish cars I'm buying with approx £320 buyer fees, the buyer fees should drop to around £180 ish per car once I'm on the Gold tier. That's useful to know, thanks for the insight

[Maz_uk]

I'm a Gold buyer with BCA, soon to be Platinum 99+ p/a.

I paid £161 fees for a £6000 car.

£134 for an £1850 car, not quite sure how it works but it's a massive saving on private fees.

I'll let you know how much I save when I roll to Platinum.

[soxboy]

What would the fees be for a blue cardholder? (i.e. less than 4 cars per annum, on say a £10k car)

[mocca]

I'm a gold buyer with bca too. I think gold almost halves the fees paid by the general member of public. From what I can remember blue gives you a useful saving so definitely apply for it, especially as it is not that hard to obtain.

[Jazzer77]

I have a black card and still think the fees are too high.....
Not a huge difference between black and gold.

[bluesntwos]

I used to buy all our family private cars at BCA auctions and have bought about five or six since 2005. However, the last car I bought was a Mondeo in April 2011. The hammer price was £1300 but the fees were £300!!!!!!!!! Talk about taking the p!ss or what??!! Another 25%+ on the hammer price. Add to that the £26 for sending a logbook off and I have now called it a day with BCA.

[StyleTechnik]

That is prob what there trying to do, get rid of the public joes and get teh dealers buying again as most have had it with bca

[johnnyboy101]

i think the cheaper cars are not worth buying especially if you are not a card holder because as you go up the price range the amount you pay in fees ratio to cost of the car becomes significantly better.

[r4scal]

The problem is everyone does buy the cheaper cars to get their foot in the door so to speak. I go to my local auction which is getting busier all the time due to everyone getting fed up of the ripoff that is BCA..
I don`t pay over £100 buyers fee on any value of car and have bought loads of decent cars.
This is the one I go to.. www.westcoast-auctions.co.uk

[dazco]

r4scal said:

The problem is everyone does buy the cheaper cars to get their foot in the door so to speak.

I would say that it is because they do not expect the drastic rip off fees that are charged to purchasers.

None of the fees are posted around the sales room and they are next to impossible to find on their website

[spikeyhead]

dazco said:

r4scal said:

The problem is everyone does buy the cheaper cars to get their foot in the door so to speak.

I would say that it is because they do not expect the drastic rip off fees that are charged to purchasers.

None of the fees are posted around the sales room and they are next to impossible to find on their website

They used to be on the walls at Bedford, posted in a few places too.

[dazco]

spikeyhead said:

They used to be on the walls at Bedford, posted in a few places too.

Hitler used to be a corporal

[Pork]

dazco said:

I would say that it is because they do not expect the drastic rip off fees that are charged to purchasers.

None of the fees are posted around the sales room and they are next to impossible to find on their website

Last time I went (which was a couple of months ago now!) there was a list of what the fees would be on a number of the walls, inluding the urinal! Novel. They also had a stack of A4 paper in several palces with the same info.

[dazco]

Pork said:

Last time I went (which was a couple of months ago now!) there was a list of what the fees would be on a number of the walls, inluding the urinal! Novel. They also had a stack of A4 paper in several palces with the same info.

Fair enough, it is about three years since I last went and that was to Preston.

I hope they have made it easier for people to see the buyers fees, that gives me a little more faith in large companies.

The terms are still not on their very large web site though.

[jamhetmet]

Hi, I'm afraid a lot of you are behind the times with BCA's fee's etc but first things first. One of you guys hit the nail on the head when they said BCA do not want "private buyers" at their auctions and the card scheme IS designed to deter them. Without any sort of card, blue, silver, gold, platinum or black, the fees are astronomical. The most common trade card is the gold card, obtained by buying 12 plus cars a year, and the fees on that on average are £190-£200 per car under £2000, the fee does vary depending on the value of the car bought, so for a couple of hundred quid banger you would pay less, around £100-£120. By law BCA cannot ban private buyers so they deter them with high fees for the private one off buys, which I have to say I totally agree with, private buyers are a pain in the bum for various reasons and should really stick to the small "local auctions". I will justify that comment if anyone is interested or offended by it.
The other thing you should all know is that BCA own the notorious "We Buy Any Car .com" and their auctions are full of those vehicles branded as UK Car Group and grade the cars from Premium to Select to Trade and to No Reserve, UKCG Premium being late, low mileage expensive cars down to UKCG No Reserve which is the real bargain basement and involve some right animals. To use an example BCA Blackbushe near Camberley, which I think is the largest auction site in the country, has for sale on average 1000-1200 cars 3 days a week plus a huge commercial sale and a specialist sale, on the Monday, Weds and Friday which are the general sales nearly half the cars sold are We Buy Any Car.com cars, a great little business, rip of desperate members of the public by buying cars for a fraction of their true value then a quick polish and rebrand them UKCG and then flood their own auction houses up and down the country and resell at top dollar with a hefty commission on top, brilliant eh.... good old BCA !
One last thing and its a word of warning to any private punters thinking of venturing into one of BCA's many outlets, be very very careful, you will be swimming with sharks, every trick in the book is employed to hide, mask, disguise and cover up the many defects these cars carry. Not of all of course and in an attempt to balance my comments a lot of decent cars do go through those halls and bargains can be had, so if you like playing Russian Roulette I wish you all the best.

[AdamIndy]

jamhetmet said:

Hi, I'm afraid a lot of you are behind the times with BCA's fee's etc

This thread is a few years old.

jamhetmet said:

By law BCA cannot ban private buyers so they deter them with high fees for the private one off buys, which I have to say I totally agree with, private buyers are a pain in the bum for various reasons and should really stick to the small "local auctions". I will justify that comment if anyone is interested or offended by it.

I'll bite, why might this be? Genuinely interested by the way.