Dealership operations

The trade-in question you cannot answer, and the one you must

"What will you give me for mine?" arrives before the question about the car being sold, and it is the one question a dealership cannot answer honestly without seeing the vehicle. Most answer it anyway, with a range, and then spend the appraisal arguing their way back down from it.

A number given remotely is a ceiling, not an estimate

Whatever figure a customer hears first becomes the number they believe they are owed. Every deduction found at the appraisal - the kerbed wheel, the missing service history, the tyre at the limit - then reads as the dealership walking back a promise. The appraisal stops being a valuation and becomes a negotiation about a figure that was never grounded in anything.

What can be published, and it is more than nothing

How the valuation is arrived at: what is inspected, which documents affect the figure, how long the appraisal takes, and how long the offer stands once made. Whether the offer is conditional on buying from you. Whether outstanding finance can be settled against it. None of these is a price, all of them are what the customer is actually trying to find out, and together they are the difference between a considered enquiry and a tyre-kick.

The paperwork question decides whether they come in

Registration document, service record, both keys, outstanding finance settlement figure. A customer who arrives without them cannot complete, and a customer who does not know they are needed arrives without them. One published list converts a wasted appointment into a completed one, and it is the cheapest thing on this page to fix.

Capturing the vehicle beats quoting a price

Make, model, year, mileage, registration and a note of anything the owner volunteers is a record the sales desk can act on before the customer arrives - and a demand signal nobody is currently collecting. An assistant that takes those details at eleven at night, states the process honestly and refuses to put a number on it has done the whole of the useful part.

Frequently asked questions

Should an assistant ever quote a part-exchange figure?
No, and you should require that it refuses. A figure given without seeing the car becomes the number the customer believes they are owed, and every deduction at the appraisal then looks like a retraction. Saying plainly that the valuation needs the vehicle is the answer that keeps the deal.
What should a dealership publish about trade-ins?
What is inspected and what affects the figure, how long the appraisal takes, how long an offer stands, whether it is conditional on a purchase, whether outstanding finance can be settled against it, and the documents to bring. Six facts, none of them a price.
Why does the document list matter so much?
Because without the registration document, the service record, both keys and a settlement figure the appraisal cannot complete. A customer who did not know arrives without them, and that is a lost appointment on both sides for want of one published sentence.
What does capturing the vehicle details actually get us?
A record the desk can prepare against before the customer arrives, and over time a list of what people are trying to part-exchange - which is stock intelligence nobody collects today, because the conversation happens on the telephone and leaves no trace.
Which languages can an enquiry arrive in?
Hebrew with full right-to-left layout, English and Russian, detected from what the customer writes. It matters here because a registration or a mileage transcribed through a second language is the ordinary way the wrong car gets appraised.

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