A colleague’s family were selling a wonderful Saab 9-3 after a bereavement and they wanted a quick sale.
The 57-plate ice blue convertible featured the 2.0-litre turbo engine and wasn’t in any particularly special specification, but it did have one special attribute on its side – a mileage of just 7,750.
The incredible car was in as-new condition with only a few minor marks and a sun-damaged rubber around the aerial. That was it. This was a time-warp car and pretty much impossible to find another like it.
First problem was valuing it. The owner had been given a price by We Buy Any Car of just over £1,500, while Cap valued it at £1,000 trade and £1,995 retail.
I wasn’t convinced any of those prices were right. So I turned to Percayso – a trade pricing platform I find far more accurate when looking at the values of older cars.
That pricing product, formerly known as Cazana, then bought by Cazoo before it hit the rocks and sold it off again to its current owners, uses data from advertised cars across the UK. It has records of 800,000 used cars and crunches this to give you live pricing.
Percayso thought the trade value of the Saab was closer to £6k and retail of around £7,500.
So I took a punt. Not knowing where on earth it would land I offered £2,500, sealed the deal and my colleague bought it down to us at the Clever Car Collection.
We could soon see this was a special car. The annual road tax of more than £750 meant the previous owners only taxed it during the summer and garaged it for the rest of the year when it was SORN.
That had preserved its showroom condition and after our valeting expert Luke had worked his magic with the Autoglym polish, it looked brand new.
We couldn’t work out what to do with it, though. Listing it for sale on Auto Trader, or our other advertising outlets, would do it an injustice and it was impossible to price.
What this car needed was an auction sale, so we turned to the experts at Car & Classic.
This enthusiast-heavy website has an auction platform for these rarities and a huge audience to put them in front of.
So we listed it for sale there. The auctions are open to the trade to sell too, and setting up an account is pretty simple. The team will even help write the advert and take the pictures for you, but we did our own.
We also produced our usual sales walk around video – something we do for all our used cars – and Car & Classic hosted it natively on their platform. I can advise doing something similar as it got great feedback from the eventual winner.
And so to the sale. The auction ran over seven days after a period of pre-listing advertising drummed up some interest.
On the first day of the sale the bids came in thick and fast and soon it was at £5,000. I’d predicted a final sale price of £5,750 and was very happy with the price on day one.
Not much happened for the rest of the week, until the final hour of bidding when it rocketed further. It settled at £9.200 for a while, until a bidder swept in the final few minutes with a £10,000 killer bid.
And that’s where it finished. We were amazed, and it proved an auction was exactly the right place for a special car like this.
But that’s not where the story ends. The next day I received a call from the winning bidder who was not happy they’d won.
He told me the auction platform had ‘gone wrong’. The site lets you bid in two ways – you can bid in increments or you can enter a max bid. He’d entered £10,000 and instead of clicking increments, he’d hit max bid.
This took it from £9,200 to £10,000 and wiped out the other bidders. He told me on the phone that he wasn’t happy to pay £10,000 and offered me £9,600 as an agreement outside of the auction.
I told him that’s not how we do business. We were paying Car & Classic a 6% fee on the sale and by going outside of the auction we would circumnavigate that. I didn’t feel that was fair.
I told him to take his complaint up with the auction site. They investigated and found it was user error – he’d simply hit the wrong button while bidding.
Quite why he entered £10,000 if he wasn’t prepared to pay it is beyond me. It was also impossible to know if he had of entered bids in increments whether the other bidders would have continued along with him until it hit £10,000 anyway.
I also had to consider that if the winning bidder had been this much trouble before buying the car, what was he going to be like afterwards? I’ve been told many times by far more seasoned traders that sometimes the best car you sell is one you don’t, and that advice has often rung in my ears.
I spoke to the auction site and discussed re-listing the car, but instead we decided to go to the next bidder. We agreed a price of £9,250 with them and delivered the car to him in Chesterfield last week.
He was a former Saab dealer himself and had been looking for one for his collection. He was over the moon with the car, and our service, and even called us up afterwards to tell us so.
I’ll certainly use the Car & Classic site again for other similar cars. The auction platform has huge reach across Europe and can often generate real value for odd-ball cars that might not get the attention they deserve on other platforms. Hopefully, the winning bidders in the future will be less hassle.