Make More Money Buying and Selling Used Cars

Making a living off buying and selling used cars has traditionally been something associated with car dealers. A lot of us, despite our inclination towards this industry, simply can’t afford to buy or lease the parking lot and office space to setup a genuine, workable used car dealership and support the HR, advertising and marketing budgets to sustain such a venture. But downward pressure on car prices and the abundance of free online automobile classifieds means you can actually make a living off used cars sitting at home even if its not on the same scale.

People looking actively for a particular kind of car make and model are the ones who are willing to pay a premium on their purchases, people who are passionate about cars. So where do you find such people? Online classifieds. Classifieds can be more general catering to several categories including use cars or can be dedicated to automobiles and other vehicles. Look for ‘cars wanted’ ads in both types of classifieds websites. A way to make your search more valuable is to download and install the Alexa toolbar and see which websites in your search results rank high on average daily traffic. You’ll be surprised to learn that websites on the second and third pages of your search results often have better rankings and hence, are of more use to us.

Once you’ve identified the websites start looking at the wanted ads and figure out which of the cars in demand are in demand and see the kinds that are more rare, but not impossible to find. You should be able to come up with at least a few makes and models that more than one person is looking for. Once you’re done at this end start searching for used cars for sale and try and find a match. Contact dealers and also do a general search for the car in Google. You can even ask the car manufacturer for assistance.

Once you’ve done this often enough you’ll find that your contacts will grow and it will become easier and quicker for you to locate rare cars. Your contacts should include car dealers, rare car dealers, car manufacturers and other individuals that share your passion for cars.

Another great place for you to develop such contacts is social networking sites like Facebook and Orkut.. These sites have groups dedicated to all sorts of cars and they’re very easy to join. You often find ads for unusual and rare cars on sale in these group forums. Be an active participant and get to know people who share your interests. Once you’ve made enough friends on the different networks you can also start your own group. Remember to make it active, interesting and post topics, links and pictures regularly. You can even post opinion polls and RSS feeds to your favorite autoblogs.

Once you’ve sourced a few cars that match the wanted ads criteria start contacting them. Make sure to focus on cars that are wanted by at least five to six individuals. In this way you protect yourself in two ways. First, if one of the individuals finds the car on his own you still have three to four more people to pitch your product. Second, you’re more likely to get the price you want if you pitch to a larger number of buyers. Remember you’re selling a desired item and you can command a reasonable premium.

Once you’ve got the hang of this you’ll see that buying and selling several cars a week will earn you a fair amount of money in relatively less time. You can even make this weekends only or after work venture, slowly building your base and expertise. Who knows, you might eventually save enough money to become a full-fledged dealer and make a living off used cars for sale. Wouldn’t that be great!