It took almost seven weeks, but our family’s 2018 Hyundai Tucson - which was a lease - is finally sold off. Made a decent bit of profit too, which is nice. The car market is indeed super crazy right now: the absolute worst time to buy a car, but the best time to have a car to sell. The local CarMax gave us $25,000 for the three-year old Tucson that had an MSRP in the $28,000s. The lease buyout was only $16,500, including tax. Do the math!
It had to be said though our Tucson has relatively low mileage (~18,200) and is practically pristine. Your mileage (pun intended) will vary. Don’t look to get around the same money if your Tucson had significantly more miles.
The $8,500 in profit isn’t without some excruciating waiting and patience. Due to the aforementioned crazy car market, leasing companies have stopped the practice of lease buyouts by a third party. No longer can you take your lease vehicle to CarMax (and the like) and have them cut you a check for the difference in present value and the payoff price. The contract buyout price the leasing companies has is with you; they are not legally obligated to sell to third party for that same price.
And at present time, the lease companies aren’t willing to sell at all. They want to impel the customer to return the car to the brand’s dealership. Because there is an absolute dearth of new car inventory due to the chip shortage.
In order to sell the Tucson and get some money back, we had to do it the roundabout way: buy the car outright from Hyundai, then sell the car to CarMax ourselves. Paying for the car was easy - electronic bank transfer - but then we had to wait over two weeks for Hyundai Finance to mail us the title. With the pink slip in hand, there was another problem: CarMax (and the like) only accepts a clean title: the paper cannot include the leasing company as a registered owner, even though they’ve signed it off to you, and there’s a bill of sale.
Getting a clean title required a trip to the local DMV. After paying $25 to transfer the title to my father’s name only, it was then another prolonged wait for the unencumbered title to arrive in the mail.
That took another three weeks, but thankfully the new pink slip came last Friday. We immediately schedule an appointment at CarMax the very next day. Two hours on the premises later, and finally we unburdened ourselves of Tucson. A whole month after my father have already leased another car! Thank god I had the parking space at work to store the Tucson during this time.
So yeah, if you have a car to sell, now is the best time! I just hope you’re not also looking to buy one as well…
Today’s office.