5 Best Tips to Maximize Your Trade-In Value

When shopping for a new car, trading in your vehicle can come in handy. Trade-ins help bring down your overall costs at dealerships and give you the most bang for your buck. That doesn’t mean though to go into a car dealership blind and take any amount that they’ll give you without finding out information about your trade-in first.

Before trading in your car, you’ll have to follow a few different steps to ensure you’re maximizing its value as much as possible. If you know you will be using your car as a trade-in soon, utilize these steps below, and enjoy all the money you’ll be able to save in the end!

5 Ways to Maximize Your Trade-in

1. Take Care of Mechanical Issues

A big factor of trade-in prices is whether a car’s mechanical issues have been fixed or not. Because these can severely change the value of your car, you will want to take care of the easy or minor issues early.

For example, two different potential buyers can both be trading in 2018 Ford Raptors that originally costed the same but if one is severely damaged, that one will of course have a lower trade-in value. Taking on that trade-in is an investment for a dealership, which means they’ll have to spend more money fixing all the problems on the damaged truck instead of being able to put it towards a new car for the owner.

Fixing the mechanical issues will only benefit you in the end so don’t be afraid to invest a little in your car if it’s within your budget!

2. Don’t Stick to One Dealership

A big mistake a lot of potential car buyers make is going with the first trade-in price a dealer gives them. Many of them also only visit on dealer and don’t bother inquiring others! Getting the best value for your trade-in will require you to visit more than one of your local dealerships so you can negotiate and see who will give you the best transaction overall.

To get this task done, you can start with major commercialized dealers like Carvana and CarMax to see what they’d give you. Then, you can start moving slowly to the dealerships around you and eventually to smaller, private lots.

3. Focus of the Physical Aspects

A car that looks great on the outside is just as important as how it looks on the inside. Dealerships care about the aesthetic value of your car because since they’ll be investing in it, if they think it’s attractive, someone else surely will.

Getting your car detailed and cleaned before heading to the dealer is necessary to prove that you took care of the vehicle. If you know you haven’t kept yours the cleanest but want to trade it in, start investing in a maintenance routine now so you’ll have less work to do once the time for transaction comes!

4. Provide All Documentation

Even if your car is in good condition, having any reports or your car service records will be the best way for dealerships to see how much you actually took care of your car. You’ll want to make sure that any brake replacements, engine repairs, body changes, and other related maintenance alterations are documented and can be easily read by anyone.

If you didn’t keep receipts, you can visit the dealerships or shops that you fixed your car at to see if they can give you the reports you need.

5. Do Your Research

When car dealers ask you questions about your car, you’ll want to be able to really sell to them why your car is great and worth the trade-in value you want! To do this, you will need to start your research early and see how other cars like yours are being sold. What are major features that your car has that others don’t? What is the condition and mileage like of your vehicle compared to others that are being sold? Again, you don’t want to walk into a dealership blind so more information is better than less.

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