By adding a cost to advertise on the formerly free sites, it might reduce the scams. Maybe you should try a used car business like CarMax to see what they offer. It will at least put a floor on what you are willing to take. As long as you are honest when you answer their in line survey, you will get the on line offer. That was my experience, at least.
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The Carmax in my area does not sell vehicles that old, their vehicles come with a 90 day/4000 mile warranty. I doubt they will offer much for a vehicle that will go to the auction. Most of their inventory (165 vehicles) are 2015 and newer.
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Whether they sell them or not, they do buy them. I sold them a 2010 Cobalt a month ago, and a 2009 Cobalt 2 years ago. In the case of the 2009, I got way more than I expected. I sometimes wonder what they do with them, and lately I suspect that CarMax exports the cars they don’t want to put on the lot.
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Carmax has a 2010 car on the lot, the OP’s Nissan is 15 years old.
Give Craigslist a try even with the fee, Maybe Facebook marketplace although I haven’t looked there lately. The local newspapers charge as much as Auto Trader and it’s online only.
One other option. Take it to a public auction house. A roll of the dice on that, might get less, might get more. I have done that with boats. I even bid on my own to get the price up. That was risky, I might have won!
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Ah, for the old days when you could just park the car out on the front lawn with a “For Sale” sign on the windshield… Of course, it sometimes took a bit longer to find someone interested…
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When I first moved to the semi-rural area where live, people used to park cars with for sale signs near intersections, at the edge of farm fields. Some of them remained there for many weeks, but apparently most of them did sell–eventually.
I haven’t seen this practice for a few years, however.
That was nice of the thieves to use actual jack stands.
Do you think thieves used actual jack stands?
Luckily, I live in an area with an exceptionally low crime rate, so I never observed anything like that.
Probably not. Back in the '70s, one of the teachers came out at the end of the school day and found that her beloved new-ish Dodge Colt was sitting on cinder blocks. Unfortunately, the school was not in an exceptionally low crime area, and the principal kept denying that we needed a security guard for the two faculty parking areas.
My CX-7 booked for about $11k and I was going to put the price in an ad for $10k obo, but I decided to try both carmax and carvana and KBB’s cash offer. Both were within a couple hundred of each other on the price they quoted for me- just over $8k, which is about what I would have settled on from a private sale. KBB cash offer was like $4600, something I imagine a dealership would have offered me.
Carvana won out because they would come and tow my car away and Carmax would have me driving about an hour away to their closest dealership and needing a ride back home. The salesman arrived at my house as I was out going for one last ride in the old girl, we signed the paperwork in my driveway after he took it for a quick ride up and back the road. I got my check that day, deposited it in the bank the next day- he said to give it a couple of hours to be ready for deposit. Parked the car across the street at the abandoned house for easy access for the tow truck and that was the sale completed.
Just follow the directions online to see about a quote from Carmax or Carvana, they might surprise you.
Here she is, for reference:
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Readership is in local newspapers are way way down. Far better to advertise on-line for considerably more interested buyers. At least 100:1 ratio.
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And on line ads can be searched nation-wide, important in today’s tight market.
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You may have skipped over my other posts on this subject. Here is a recap:
The badge of honor goes to @wolyrobb !
Sold the car today, lead came through the Facebook marketplace.
Per my observations, I’ve got 6-8x times more leads from there than from CraigsList and NextDoor, it was also much faster and easier to communicate right in messenger there.
The final price was not as outrageous as KBB and CarFax estimated, yet it was only $700 below what I paid for the car 5 years ago.
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Congratulations, dragon.
Congrats on a successful sale!