Selling a cheap car - what to do?

[Mr Pies]

Chaps, I'm in a bit of quandary as to what to do.

I'm selling a car, nothing special but I'd like £700 (reserve set slightly lower) for it (under going rate). It has 6 months MOT. Tax is up the end of this month.
It's currently not getting many bites on eBay even though I've started it at £1, plenty of watchers though.
It ends next Tuesday.
Should I stick it in for an MOT this week and (providing she passes) read advertise it with 12 months MOT?

Does a full MOT make much of a difference for cars in this price bracket?

I'm getting twitchy because the tax is up next Monday. If it doesn't get anywhere near the price I'd like at the end of the auction (next Tuesday) I'll be stuck for getting it to the MOT place as it'll have no tax.
But on the other hand if I put it in for an MOT and it needs work doing I'm going to be out of pocket again.
It was serviced only 4 months ago and nothing was wrong but you never know with an MOT I suppose.

What would you do?

[Dave_]

You dont need road tax to take it for an MOT.

[V8forweekends]

Mr Pies said:

Does a full MOT make much of a difference for cars in this price bracket?

On the whole, I'd say yes. If I am bidding on an ultra-rare classic Lambo with no MOT, I probably don't mind the cost of getting it trailered away. Unless it's something exceptional, at £700 an MOT is going to make it loads more attractive.

That said, I'd leave it on for now - lots of people use sniping software or only bid really late because there is so much shilling.

[Matt UK]

When I've sold stuff on ebay, the price has doubled in the last few minutes!

[CAPP0]

You're panicking FAR too early if it has 8 days to go. IME things rarely get an awful lot in the way of early bids, as has been said by others. Recently auctioned a car which leapt up in price in the final few minutes.

That said, someone in the market for a £700 car of any description, unless it's a knackered classic which will take years to restore, is going to want to drive it away and use it immediately. See the bangers thread on here for evidence. So invest the £50 or so in getting it MOTd (if you think it will pass; if not then you're likely in for a world of grief and "buyer wants his money back" threads) because whilst an MOT may not make you a stack more cash, it will certainly make it easier to shift.

[Johnny 89]

I thought you could only MOT a car 1 month before it's current one is up?

[DevonPaul]

Johnny 89 said:

I thought you could only MOT a car 1 month before it's current one is up?

You can MOT a car whenever you want. However the new one will only run concurrent from the expiry of the existing one if the MOT is done in the last 4 weeks.

Re - EBAY bids. I sold 5 things on Ebay this week. All were about a fiver after 8 days.

Apart from one Swiss watch which got to 60% of it's final price with 24 hours to spare, everything else was hardly bid on until the last hour or so, and all were won with bids in the last 10 seconds. Personally I think Ebay should automatically extend the auction by 5 mins is there's a bid at the end - makes it like a proper auction.

Next batch I auction I'm tempted to put in big letters "This auction will be ended up to 2 hours before the expiry time, so if you want it, just put a fscking bid in and stick your snipe tools up your asre".

FWIW I just put a £700 Corolla up on Autotrader - £10 for 2 weeks.

Paul

[V8forweekends]

DevonPaul said:

Next batch I auction I'm tempted to put in big letters "This auction will be ended up to 2 hours before the expiry time, so if you want it, just put a fscking bid in and stick your snipe tools up your asre".

I have used sniping tools to get an item I wanted without too much risk of shilling. Shilling is too easy to do on ebay. As for the extra five minutes - someone would just write an auto snipe for that too.