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Is buying from a curbstoner necessarily a bad thing (or, are all curbstoners created equal)?
First of all, I wouldn't even be asking this if the selection of private party cars for sale in my area wasn't so anemic. But on craigslist I'm finding so few promising cars, and so many curbstoner ads, that I have to ask.
I'm familiar with a lot of the issues involved and the worst abuses committed via curbstoning. I'm not asking if it's a good idea to wittingly or unwittingly buy a car that is a salvage, stolen, had the odometer rolled back, that you won't be able to get title to, or where the seller lies about their identity and history with the vehicle (e.g. shilling for a dealership, claiming to have been the user of the car when the prior owner really was, or doing anything more deceptive than posting the vehicle as a private party sale or for sale by owner [as opposed to dealer]).
But aren't there curbstoners that aren't engaging in fraud*? What about buying from, say, a backyard mechanic who buys vehicles, does repairs, and then sells them for a profit (especially if they're up-front about it)? I've only bought a couple of cars, and my first car (more or less) was bought from such a person. That wasn't a bad car in my experience.
*(I guess in some cases there's an issue of curbstoners depriving the state of taxes it wants to collect by buying / selling more cars than they say you can without a dealer license, but I'm going to leave that alone, especially since I doubt the state is doing anything to save me from the hassle of having to wade through and recognize these numerous curbstoner ads.)
Any car I consider buying, I'm going to do the following, usually in this order:
1) Get vehicle history report(s).
2) Check the VIN number when I see the car.
3) Look at the car / test drive / verify that seller has title to the car, or has whatever I'll need to get title to it (I have to check on those details). For example, I'd see if they have the title or necessary documentation and compare that to their driver's license.
4) Get the car inspected by a mechanic.
5) I wouldn't accept an offer to let them handle registration for me. I might complete the sale at the DMV, if that's possible and helpful in my state.
In articles denouncing curbstoning I see some reasons for avoiding them that ring hollow with me:
The seller may lie about the condition of the vehicle / it may have hidden problems.
This is true of any used car purchase.
If there turn out to be problems with the car, you'll have no recourse.
I don't believe my state has any lemon law that applies to used cars, so this would be true of any used car purchase, unless there was a warranty.
You might have trouble getting title / registration
This seems like something that can be avoided by knowing what documentation is required and making sure to get it, and taking precautions like matching the seller's driver's license to other documentation. This could also happen with a real private seller who doesn't know what to do, if you don't know either and make sure it gets done. The last time I bought a car (from a real private seller, as far as I know) he made a mistake when filling out the back of the title and I didn't know about it until I tried to register the car and they wouldn't let me. I had to get the seller to fax me something to get it straightened out.
The articles denouncing curbstoning seem to almost uniformly say that curbstoners don't register the vehicles. I'm not buying a vehicle from anyone without taking it for a test drive, so I couldn't even get to the point of making a purchase if the car isn't registered and I can't test drive it. How do the curbstoners get past this? Do the people who sell to them leave the plates on the car? Do the curbstoners put random plates on? Do potential buyers test drive the cars with no plates? Are the curbstoners able to get temp plates somehow?
They're shady dealers not regulated by the state
This was mentioned here: http://www.insider-car-buying-tips.com/curbstoner.html
My impression has been that all car dealers are shady. Exactly what benefit do I get from buying an unwarrantied car from a dealer licensed by the state? Is this benefit enough to justify the premium price I'd have to pay a dealer for a car?
Seller won't accept checks
Some articles about curbstoning raise the issue that the seller won't accept checks. Do they mean personal checks or cashier's checks? No private seller in their right mind would accept a personal check.
Request CarFax
This isn't a reason to avoid curbstoners, but I couldn't resist mentioning this suggestion on a www.carfax.com page that really hurt the credibility of the article for me. They rail against curbstoning and suggest buying from a dealer instead, but say that if you still want to buy from an individual, to ask the seller for a CARFAX report. Seriously?!? I have to suspect them of lying, selling me a car that's been wrecked, stolen, flood damaged, subjected to odometer fraud, etc. etc., so I should ask them to provide me with a piece of paper to prove that it doesn't have those problems? Needless to say, this isn't a suggestion I'll be following: I'll get my own vehicle history reports.
Here are things that actually do concern me:
The odometer reading is fraudulent.
How effective are vehicle history reports at exposing this? How do CarFax and AutoCheck compare? Is either one significantly better? How important would it be to use both? Or others?
The airbag is missing.
This was mentioned here: http://voices.yahoo.com/used-car-buying-101-avoid-curbstoner-his-motor-4604157.html
I never thought about that one before. Is there a way to check for that? Could it be reflected on the vehicle history reports somehow?
The car has been totaled but registered or had the title changed in another state to conceal it.
This was in the aforementioned CarFax page. How conceivable is this? Would the vehicle history reports reveal this or no? How likely is it that the mechanic I have do the pre-buy inspection would be able to recognize that the car has been that severely damaged?
Comments
A couple of things - I think it's a good sales practice for any seller to offer to provide a Carfax to a potential buyer. If you're a private seller, you just need one to let the buyer read. Dealers have subscriptions to Carfax or Autocheck and shouldn't hesitate to give you a copy of the report.
Title washing happens with car dealers too. In the case of rebuilt cars, often the pre-purchase inspection will reveal that problem if the Carfax misses it. Flood cars may be harder to spot.
Even though used car dealers may sell a car "as-is", people unwind deals all the time and sometimes (rarely?) successfully sue to get their money back when they are sold an unsafe car. (nolo.com) A curbstoner may be a hard to find and even harder to get money from than a dealer, even if you manage to get a court judgment.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm sure it is good sales practice, but as a buyer I'm not going to trust a piece of paper handed to me by a seller, especially a seller that I suspect of being a flagrant fraudster. That's what the CarFax article suggests -- suspect the seller of being a con artist willing to swindle you into buying a car that's been stolen, salvaged, had the odometer rolled back, etc., and ask them for a piece of paper to prove that it doesn't have those problems. Anything printed on paper can be faked easily enough, and someone willing to swindle you like that isn't going to mind giving you a piece of paper with fake info. Or do printed CarFax reports include a link to the report on CarFax's website? I haven't looked at a CarFax report in years.
Even if I was buying from a dealership, before I actually bought a car that I'd narrowed my selection to I'd verify the vehicle history report myself rather than rely on a printed report provided by the dealership.
So the best you can do to try to detect title washing in any sale is to get a vehicle history report and a pre-buy inspection? Anything to do about recognizing flood cars other than hope they pick up on it in a pre-buy inspection?
Do they? How do they do that?
Thanks for the link. Some of Nolo's information is useful, but I find that their info sometimes seems out of touch with reality.
In their "Did the dealer make promises?" section they say that oral promises that a dealer makes about a car may be enforceable even if the written contract says it's an as-is sale. But I think they might be glossing over the effect of the contract including the "this written contract is the entire agreement between the parties and no oral statements or representations made by the dealer or any salesperson are part of the contract." languge. I'm skeptical that that would be overlooked and oral promises taken into consideration. And of course you would need some miraculous way of substantiating your claim about what oral promises were made.
I feel like it would be an uphill battle to get a dealer to give your money back for a used car sold as-is, or to get a judgement in your favor. But if you checked a vehicle history report and had the car inspected by a mechanic before buying and then felt dissatisfied, I think you'd have a hell of a time getting your money back. A dealer would be easier to find than a curbstoner, but I feel like that provides minimal value. I think the vehicle history report and pre-buy inspection are the best protections available in either case.
You could post a fake Carfax report on your own domain, spoof the URL and then give the fake link to a buyer. Seems a stretch, but if that's a concern, just buy your own Carfax (and hope that everything is "current" on it).
One reason to get a pre-purchase inspection is to try to check that the car appears to be as it is represented. How To Avoid Buying a Flood-Damaged Car
Can You Return the Car You Just Bought?
Re suing, yeah, it's an uphill battle but the idea is to make the seller's life so miserable that unwinding the deal is less painful than going to court or answering phone calls and letters from the DA.
Agree but remember that the history reports sometimes miss something and it takes a while for the info to get collected. It's hard to beat having a relationship with a good mechanic or shop who can check out cars for you.
Fun conversation!
There's no way a seller is going to be able to spoof the URL in a way that would fool me personally. I'm not going to fall for carfax.shadycurbstoner.example or carfaxx.example or something simple to do like that (pretend ".example" is ".com"). To spoof the URL in a way that even looked legit at a glance would require them to get you accessing the internet through their local network. I don't even know if printed CarFax reports link to an online version, so I would just plan to get my own.
Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.
Thanks for the link. That article doesn't make it sound like something that happens all the time. More importantly, the only part of that that's relevant to me is the lemon part, and that's not very encouraging. I think that'd be one generous dealer who would fix problems for free on an unwarrantied car. And unless the car is a real piece of junk, it seems more likely to me that a serious problem is going to emerge some number of months after the purchase, rather than the next day, or the day after that. By that time I don't think the dealer is going to give you the time of day on being responsible for the problem.
You could try that, but in many cases the buyer is in a much more precarious, vulnerable position than the dealer. The buyer probably has a big chunk of their assets hanging in the balance, especially if having paid cash, and, if the car has serious enough problems, is the one who has to worry about how to get to work and wherever they need to go. In many cases the buyer will be the one whose life is made miserable by the situation and would have a hard time making the dealer sweat.
Yeah, that's unfortunate, but is that more likely to occur when buying from a curbstoner than a real private seller or a licensed dealer? I guess when buying from the worst kind of curbstoner it might be more likely that something that isn't on the report is a more serious problem. I don't have any extensive relationship with any shop. I might tend to go to a dealer of the given make of car to get an inspection done, since presumably no one should be more familiar with the car than them. Last time I bought a car it was a Nissan and I took it to an Infiniti dealership.
Yeah, but you're unusual in that you are a highly educated consumer. Most people have no idea what a "curbstoner" is.
And yeah, unwinding deals and lawsuits don't happen very often. But they can be options. There's also your local consumer protection agency and the local dealer association that may be able to help when a curbstoner deal goes bad. How much time and patience do you have? (Not to mention, as you say, the resources to get more wheels while you fight over the bad car).
Back to your original question and where to find the best used cars, the pecking order could go like this, from best to worse.
Used car when you know the owner (that's how I got my used Outback, and it's been fine. She hadn't even thought about selling her car until I asked, and she would up buying a new Outback, knowing she had a good "trade-in" price right off the bat).
Used car from private seller who is the original owner and has all service records, and has a good reason for selling the car.
Used car from a dealer who sells that brand (the theory being that the dealer needs used cars to sell and will specialize in their brand since they have experienced appraisers who can spot lemons, and specialized techs who can fix any problems).
Used car from a new/used car dealer. A dealer who sells both new and used cars has more interest in maintaining their reputation and will auction off lemons instead of putting them on their lot.
Used car from a used car dealer. This is bad because all used car dealers are crooks.
That's a way overly broad statement since there are good used car dealers who can spot good cars on craigslist, get "off-brand" cars fed to them from dealers and know how to buy at auction. You just have to ask around and get a feel for the store's reputation.
Used car from a buy here, pay here lot. The rap on these stores is that they will only refurbish a car enough to make it run between payments. If it breaks, they'll ducktape it back together or repo it and do just enough to sell to the next person who can't finance a better car.
Used car from craigslist. Lots of scammers are on the used car ads, and many try to make themselves appear to be legit owners selling their personal rides. Some of these sellers are actually dealers trying to avoid the $5 fee, and some are curbstoners. Checking the name on the title is a quick way to out the guys simply flipping cars since they will try to avoid the registration fees.
Used car from a curbstoner, for all the reasons you've outlined above.
One of the first questions I ask is " How long have you owned it"
And " Do you have the title? Is it in your name"?
If they stutter and say " Well...I'm selling it for a friend"
You are dealing with a curbstoner.