Selling your car can be tedious and time-consuming, and it’s even worse when you opt to sell it on your own. If you decide to take it to a dealer to sell or trade-in, it’ll be a lot easier but you can never tell whether the price the dealer is offering you is his or her best.
Selling your car directly will definitely fetch you better prices, but this can be a long and painful process as there are various steps involved before the actual sale actually takes place. This entire process right from advertising your car to actually closing the deal can take weeks, if not months. You will need to be there at every step, doing it all on your own.
Here are some of the biggest pain points you have to face if decide to sell your car on your own:
Determining the market price
How much is your car worth? Most people would check on the usual car listing sites like carlist, oto, or motortrader and compare their cars to listing prices of the same model from the same year. However, what both buyers and sellers usually miss out are, these cars are not in the same condition or have the same features (if there are add-ons).
By putting a rough estimation of the price on your listing, it poses a risk for both seller and buyer. The seller may be selling their car below the real value of their car, while the buyer risks overpaying a car that may require significant repair works done.
Forking out the advertising cost
Next, is to advertise your car on different platforms. You can post it under the Classifieds section of the local dailies like The Star and the New Straits Times, or you can do it online on various local car listing sites.
The cost of a classifieds single-column ad on The Star National Edition is RM33.50 for five insertions, as a single insertion may not be effective, and you may have to advertise for a few days to get the right buyer.
While you can advertise for free on sites like Mudah.my, if you want your ad to run effectively, you will need to pay for it. You can “bump” your ad, which allows your ad to go on top of the listing as if it had just been put online. First “bump” (Day 1) costs RM8, and a bump after seven days costs RM48.
If you would like to sell your car urgently, you will need to pay RM15 to have the ad marks “Urgent” on the listing site.
The costs to list your car online may be optional, and how much you spend depends on the potential buyers you get. If you want quick and good results, you really need to spend a little bit of money to get them.
Filtering genuine buyers
In our earlier article on how to sell a car fast, Mr. X, the seller, advertised on a few online platforms. These generated throngs of messages via email and WhatsApp, but only about 10 were genuine enquiries.
It is not uncommon to hear stories of sellers and buyers being scammed on many listing sites. This adds pressure on both parties when they decide to buy or sell anything online.
Furthermore, it also poses a security problem when the seller decides to meet a potential buyer for viewing or test drive, and vice versa. All these problems usually lead people to selling it to a dealer instead.
The long payment process
A car is an asset and it costs a lot of money. To sell it, the transaction would obviously require quite a bit of paperwork done, which can be tedious if you do not have time to spare.
Once the final selling price has been finalised, the buyer would typically pay a small booking fee, so the seller would not sell the car to anyone else. However, the seller can choose not to refund the fee should the buyer back out on the deal.
The buyer may choose to buy by cash or through a bank’s hire purchase loan. Cash deals can be done quite quickly, but if he/she choose to get it through a loan, there is a risk that the bank may reject the loan applied by the buyer. This could make the process longer, or worse, cause you loss of opportunity as you could have sold it to someone else within that time.
If the hire purchase loan is rejected, you need to start looking for a buyer again, by repeating the process of advertising and showcasing the car to potential buyers.
Inspection and transfer of ownership
Before officially transferring the ownership of the car, the seller is responsible in getting his/her car inspected by PUSPAKOM, and ensuring the car passes the inspection. Upon approval by PUSPAKOM, the buyer would need to proceed to purchase insurance for the car, with coverage of at least 90% of the car’s value.
The buyer and the seller would need to take a trip to the Jabatan Pengangkutan Jalan (JPJ) to apply for the transfer of ownership.
Is there an easier way to sell a car in Malaysia?
Yes, selling a car is not easy at all. Is there a way to get a fair and accurate selling price, and also save time while getting rid of your used car?
If you are thinking about selling your car but don’t have much time to spend on advertising or scheduling viewing appointments, then selling your car online with CARSOME can really make your life easier.
With CARSOME, you can sell your car easily at a fair price with full transparency and save yourself plenty of energy, time and money on advertising, haggling, hassling and fraud.
Sell Your Car in 5 Steps
Selling your vehicle on CARSOME comes with many perks and none of the hassle.
100% free to sell your vehicle to CARSOME
Traditionally, if you choose to sell your vehicle on your own, you may have to fork out some money and time (which equals money), to list your car online and to meet up with numerous prospective buyers for viewing and test driving.
However, with CARSOME, you will not only get the FREE and no-obligation car inspection to determine the actual price for your car but you will get access to their service that sells your car for the best possible price with the least effort.
Based on their assessment, CARSOME will then offer to buy your car on the spot, which you can decide to accept immediately or choose to put your car up for bidding to see if you can get a better price.
With this simple and easy process, you do not have to pay for inspection, listing for bidding, or handling fee. It is, in fact, 100% free service for the sellers.
Get the highest price for your car
If you wish to get a higher offer, CARSOME will schedule to put your car up for a three- to six-hour bidding among over 100 (and still expanding) of their Certified Used Car Dealers network. The starting price shall be agreed upon between CARSOME and the seller prior to the bidding.
You will then receive a link via SMS and email to login to your dashboard and view the real-time live bidding. This provides full transparency with no price mark-up or hidden charges among all parties.
This will ensure you are given the option to go for the highest price offered, with no hassle. After the bidding process, you are given a maximum of 48 hours to decide on the bidder, which can be done with just a simple click of a button online. CARSOME will honour the highest bid price upon acceptance of bid within 48 hours.
You will not be afforded this transparency should you choose to sell your car to a dealership traditionally, as you have no idea of knowing if the price offered is the highest price you can get on the vehicle.
Sell your car in 24 hours
If you choose to accept the offer, CARSOME will then arrange for ownership transfer and payment will be made to you online during the ownership transfer. All paperwork will be handled by CARSOME.
Depending on your urgency, CARSOME can help you sell your car within 24 hours – that’s the beauty of CARSOME’s services. CARSOME does all the legwork and paperwork for you, so you can cash-in your used car without breaking a sweat.
Other than saving time, CARSOME’s simple selling process also eliminates the hassle of dealing with scammers, screening of potential buyers and setting up countless appointments for viewing and test driving with these potential buyers. And the best thing about selling on CARSOME is, you get a much better pricing than trading in to a used car dealer. Through CARSOME, you will be getting a suitable selling price after a proper valuation and assessment is done on your car.
CARSOME not only buys cars from individuals, they also welcome company registered cars. All the inspection, sales and paperwork are done for free.
Save both time and money by letting CARSOME do all the legwork for you.
