PH was sad to see the little Pug go
It’s been a roller coaster ride selling our Peugeot 205 GTI but we are pleased to report our little hot hatch has finally gone. Actually it's bittersweet. The car had to go so it is nice we’ve got the sale, but the little Pug was so much fun to drive and so loveable we were a bit sad to see it go.
There is no place for sentiment though in the tough world of used cars and so we continue onwards and upwards. The final price for the car was £950, which almost doubled our money from the £500 we paid for it. Some said we would be lucky to make any money at all, while others offered thousands. One person even questioned our morals for attempting to make any profit at all, although it probably would have been a boring feature if we hadn’t.
To use a cliché, the car was only worth what someone was prepared to pay for it, and the market for a LHD Pug GTI was, we found, small but enthusiastic. The problem was working out what we should try and sell it for. It had only 66,000 miles, no rust, eight months MOT, tax, an original and rust-free body and a spotless interior. We had dozens of offers in the beginning ranging from £600 to £2,000.
We were contacted by the man who offered the latter and he flew in from the Continent to look at the car. Fresh from Heathrow he left a black cab with the meter running and gave the car the once over. Seemingly interested he offered £2,000 but only if we drove it to the other side of London for an inspection by his mechanic. Because of the time, inconvenience and no promise of a sale afterwards I asked him to make an offer now. He could take the car as seen and I was happy to take a few hundred quid less. He declined and after several more phone conversations the sale fizzled out, leaving me to question how interested he was in the first place.
We then had a crack at eBay and probably made our first real mistake. Putting the car up for £1,500 was far too high and it only attracted one bidder. One bid is a sale you might think, but not when it turns out to be a student who doesn’t actually have the money in the first place. Meanwhile I had a Spanish man call me pretending to be the highest bidder and promising to collect the car, although he too later disappeared.
Next up was the Autotrader website and again, buoyed by the initial flood of offers we had for the car of over £1,000, we again put it up for £1,500. Lots of calls but no views later the ad finished and we were starting to get the feeling that the car probably wasn’t worth one and a half. It also hadn’t helped that one of the days we were trying to sell it was Christmas day, which was dutifully scribbled down in the ‘how not to sell a car’ handbook.
Back to eBay then and this time we went for broke. £1,000 start would surely get the punters salivating and we put up all our best pics of the Pug. Five days later, not a sausage. A few inquiries and 75 watchers showed people were interested but the bidding was starting to look like Mexican stand-off. I dropped the price to £700 in the hope of getting a bite and still nothing.
It was the last day of the auction and I checked the Pug for the 25th time that hour, only to find a solitary bid staring back at me. The PH office erupted with the kind of whoops and cheers you might expect to see if England went one up to Brazil in the World Cup. But the excitement didn’t end there – eight bids, yes eight, later the car had been sold to a garage owner from Yorkshire.
The money went into my account the next day and the car was collected this week by a private firm, destined to be a runaround for the owner who had one as a youth. I guess the whole idea of buying and selling our own sheds is about learning the right and wrong way of selling cars. The biggest lesson learnt from the Pug was it would have been better to sell cheaper but sooner and move on. Keeping the car just means more miles, less tax, less MOT and more grief trying to sell it. But there you go, sell it we did and there can’t be many cars you can expect to double your money on.
We made £255 profit from the Maestro, turning the original £500 into £755, and now have £450 from the Pug giving us the grand total of £1,205. However we had to give PayPal £32.00 for giving us our money (?!) and spent £8 on the eBay ad, having been reimbursed for the Autotrader and original eBay ad from the non-buyer. This gives us £1,165 in the kitty.
Armed with our new knowledge we march on towards our next shed purchase and are interested in your suggestions. Do we go for something specialised and hope for a big profit, or get some mainstream metal that sells quick for a fast buck? Whatever it is, we might have to go for RHD this time…
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