Gone In 60 Seconds

Part 3 of V8mate's guide to the auction scene

By V8mate / Wednesday, 3 June 2009 / Loading comments

If you enjoy going to motorsport events, the sound of the cars starting up always gets the hairs on the back of your neck tingling. Whether it’s your first time or you’re an old hand, the thrill of hearing the motors leap into life is always one of the highlights of the day.

Having filled your belly with tea and watched the cars start to stream through the auction hall, you’ll start to feel the first butterflies in your stomach as the first car on your short-list gets closer in the running order. You have given the exterior a good going over, peered through the glass but now you want to see and hear some evidence of its mechanical competence. So you leave the hall, go back out into the lot and wait for its driver to turn up.

Does it open with a blip of the key-fob or is the driver struggling to get a dead car open? You ask the friend who has accompanied you to stand strategically at the rear of the car to see what might splutter its way out of the exhaust and wait on tenterhooks as the driver starts the car, your eyes fixed on the dash, watching all of the system lights go out and the vehicle settle to tick over.

Your stomach settles a little. The car has started cleanly and promptly; no untoward rattles, noises or emissions. But you know that you have little more than two minutes between this vehicle sitting out in the quiet of the yard and it coming before the auctioneer. As it pulls away to join the queue for the auction hall you start to make your way methodically round. Each time it stops, you open a door or the boot or the glove-box, looking for marks, stains, rust; anything for a clue of a shadowy past. You dig under the boot carpet, searching for the spare wheel and checking around its holder for any sign of repaired damage.

Then you’re back with the driver. Is the engine management light on or off? If it’s on, what’s the cause? Does the system just need a reset or is it hinting at painful bills to come? You have to condense every question you might ask in an hour buying a car privately into two minutes; and there’s only you providing the answers. How do the professionals do it? Many of them never leave the auction hall; they make their mind up walking round each car just once!

Your car is now a mater of seconds from demanding its sixty seconds from the auctioneer. Convinced you’ve found exactly what you’ve been looking for, you watch the few cars ahead of yours go through. But what on earth is the auctioneer saying? You can barely understand a word!

Regular auction-goers will soon pick-up each individual auctioneer’s phrases and nuances. As an occasional buyer you need to be absolutely on your guard. They will start with a brief summary of the vehicle and then ask ‘Who’ll give me £x,000 for this car?’ What seems like an honest question on the face of it can be a pit ready for you to fall into. Some auctioneers will use that question to propose a sensible starting price. This can often save time as an experienced buyer will immediately respond with an acknowledging bid. Other auctioneers will pitch that suggested start price at anywhere between the vendor’s reserve, so the likely end-point of all bids, right out to the retail value of the car or beyond. Hopefully you will have done some homework regarding the price of cars you favour but, whatever you do, don’t dive in to bidding; let someone else make the opening bid. If it’s more than you wanted to pay, you haven’t lost anything anyway.

Now, you may have thought that once an opening bid, or even several, have been made, that it’s safe to join the throng. Shockingly, it is still not uncommon for auctioneers to engage in ‘bidding off the wall’. They will start to rattle off bids as if the car is very popular; the process designed to snare people into bidding who are either not concentrating on the auctioneer or who are nervous and don’t want to miss out on a car which is bid and then sold in short order. If you are attending with a friend, get them stand across the car from you and when bidding starts, the two of you should scan the hall to identify who is bidding. If the auctioneer has genuine bid interest he will look and point at each person who bids; use that to spot the ‘competition’.

So your car is next up. You’ve checked it out, you’ve decided on the maximum you’ll pay for it and you’re ready to deal with the auctioneer. Next week, we’ll look at the possible sale outcomes of your chosen lot, methods of deciding how much to pay and one way of bagging a bargain which the trade may steer clear of.

This week’s auction price list (see thread below) is an example of a major clearance by two manufacturer’s finance arms: BMW/MINI and Mercedes/Smart. With 250 prices, it will hopefully represent a major snapshot of these marques which are ever popular with PHers and, given the impact on prices, colours have been included this week too. Bear in mind that the vast majority of these, especially those under 3 years old, will have been purchased by main dealers, hence the high prices. So don’t be surprised if you can find the odd cheaper example on Autotrader. The BMW/MINI entries were almost all valeted to BMW retail standards and dealers will improve their margin on each car through BMW (UK) bonuses for selling them through the ‘Approved Used’ scheme.

Part one can be found here

Part two can be found here