McCluskey Chevy Can Help With Your Trade-in Value

So, you are ready for your next vehicle. Maybe you have moved up in life and would like something a little newer and nicer. Maybe you have just gotten a new job where your commute is longer. Maybe the next generation of your favorite vehicle is coming out and you want to upgrade to the next version. Perhaps you are having to downgrade. There are plenty of good reasons for that, too. Maybe you are expecting a child and are going from a brand new Corvette to a more family friendly vehicle. Either way, you are going to take that step and trade in your current wheels for the next thing. You want to make absolutely sure you get the best possible trade-in value for your former ride. How do you go about that?

Research Your Trade-In Value

At McCluskey Chevrolet, we want you to get the best trade-in value, too. We will conduct our own appraisal of your old vehicle, but that does not mean you cannot do one of your own. There are plenty of places online where you assess your vehicle. Kelley Blue Book is the most famous, and rightly so. They have decades of experience and resale reports from around the world are updated on a daily basis. Places like Kelley, Edmunds.com, Car and Driver and others offer online tools to help you get an idea of where you stand. And you can do multiple assessments and take an average if you would like.

While doing your homework, remember that there are variables that will reflect the trade in value of your vehicle. These can include the time of year, where you are located and local market. For instance, a large SUV will probably not sell as well in the inner city. They take up room and are sometimes hard to navigate on smaller city streets. There is not as much market for them there. Conversely, a hybrid vehicle may not have much of a market in rural areas, especially in agriculture-based societies. Farmland and hybrid vehicles don’t exactly mix well. Also, a lot of dealerships will be offering specials around holidays. You’ve surely seen commercials offering July 4th, Labor Day or Christmas specials. Dealerships are less likely to give you a better trade-in value when they are expecting to move more vehicles than an average week.

The Deep Clean

There are a lot of steps you need to make before presenting your vehicle for trade in. You should expect that our staff at McCluskey Chevy will do an inspection of your car. That is standard practice. To that end, you want to make sure your car is in the best condition it has ever been in. That means it is cleaned inside and out, top to bottom. Whatever it takes to get your car in better shape than you have ever seen it, take those steps. That includes vacuuming, shampooing the carpets, Armor-All wipes on the dashboard and every other interior surface, etc. Run it through the car wash, then run it through again. Get it professionally detailed. Make sure that your vehicle is in such condition that you are having second thoughts about trading it in.

Make sure that all of your personal items and effects are removed from the vehicle. That not only includes what is inside the interior and the trunk, but also any bumper stickers, decals, vanity plates or novelty items attached to the exterior.

Vehicles will naturally have some nicks and cuts, scrapes and bruises. You ever get a phantom bruise and wonder when and where you got it? We all have. Cars and trucks get them too. Maybe some inconsiderate person in a grocery store parking lot ran their cart against your passenger door and didn’t leave a note. Perhaps some kids playing football in the street bumped up against your truck and inadvertently left a small dent in your fender. It happens to everyone.

Or maybe it was a mistake of your own doing. For example, my grille has a chunk the size of a fingernail missing off of it from when I was scraping ice and snow off of my car. Some had frozen and stuck to the grille and brought a little piece of it off with it. I didn’t notice it until days later. It happens.

While those things may seem insignificant or even inconsequential now, they can have a massively detrimental effect on your trade-in value. Spend the extra couple of bucks to get those dings, scratches, dents and missing chunks fixed before attempting to trade your car in. If you don’t, the dealer will have to pay to fix those things. You could do it yourself for free or spend a nominal fee to have them professionally done. The cost ratio to having a dealer do them instead will have a negative impact on your trade in value.

Homework and Paperwork

When it comes time to make the trade-in be sure to have all the necessary paperwork on the car with you. This includes the title (and anyone else whose name may be on the title), registration, maintenance history, repair history, and any other applicable documents. If you forget any, it will be a hassle to have to turn around and go back home to get them. If you can’t go back home to get them, you may have to pay a fee for a duplicate. Remember, you are trying to make money on this deal, not lose money.

Once you have established the dollar amount for your trade in, you can apply that money to a new vehicle. That can go towards the down payment on the new car. If you are downgrading for one reason or another, you might be able to get the new vehicle at a ridiculously low cost.

We want you to have the best experience possible at McCluskey Chevrolet. We won’t be like the guys on Pawn Stars and give you a fraction of its real value. We are not like that. We know that you have other choices and want to give you the best business principles to keep our customers happy. We thrive on our reputation and the word of our loyal customers. We practice honest, ethical business and we will prove that to you in the trade-in process.

Your Trade-In Value at McCluskey

We invite you down to McCluskey Chevrolet to talk to our staff about the trade-in process. Because evaluating trade-ins is not an exact science, every situation is different. Kelley Blue Book is a solid, reliable source, but it is not absolute. Neither are any estimations or pricing tools you will find online.

Our staff will make an honest estimation of your vehicle. We will take into account all the positive attributes, such as make, model, trim level, condition, mileage, year and more. We will also have to consider any negative aspects, such as accidents, major repairs, excessive mileage and those dings and dents you didn’t fix. There are also neutral factors to consider, such as whether or not this particular make and model is already on our lot, and how popular this body style is with our customer base.

We look forward to working with you and getting you the best possible trade-in value for your automobile exchange.