Looking for second hand vehicle

I’m looking to buy a van soon, I use gumtree but what other sites would you recommend in looking for a second hand vehicle?

Reply 1

Dee-Emma

Facebook marketplace. Auto trader.

Reply 2

StriderHort

Yeah FB and AT would be the other ones I'd use, possibly Parkers (but never used myself) They are all just glorified classified ads pages.

(Don't buy any of the vans I want)

Reply 3

username5252878

Original post by jay373

I’m looking to buy a van soon, I use gumtree but what other sites would you recommend in looking for a second hand vehicle?

Co-part. You have to go through auction, and bid. All the vehicles are either accident prone, but you can take it to a mechanic and you have yourself a second hand car.

I personally have done this myself, and have saved myself a lot of money. The car I bought runs perfect fine after 5 years of buying. Never once has it failed MOT.

If you wanted a different scope.

Reply 4

Nuffles

I don't really bother with AutoTrader these days, but I tend to buy budget stuff privately. You can only list for free under a grand, which obviously puts off a lot of private sellers.

Facebook and eBay are king for budget private sales, although Facebook has taken over eBay in the last few years for me personally. Both my partner and I bought our current cars through Facebook, and sold our old ones through Facebook. I do still cruise eBay because the search tools on Facebook are hilariously bad compared to the very good ones on eBay.

If you're looking for stuff from a dealership then Autotrader and Ebay are good. You do still find dealerships listing on Facebook but it's not as common.

Reply 5

Emma:-)

Entertainment Forum Helper

Original post by jay373

I’m looking to buy a van soon, I use gumtree but what other sites would you recommend in looking for a second hand vehicle?

Auto trader

buyacar.co.uk

Original post by Thecrazydoughnut

Personally I wouldn't go to Copart for a van unless i really knew what I was doing and willing to buy sight unseen. esp as vans have hard lives and copart charge fees/travel. (Apparently for vans the injectors going bad is a far bigger and more expensive worry, and exactly the sort of thing you wouldn't know till you'd bought it, as it still counts as 'starts & drives')

If you don't have a tame mechanic than going to a garage is v likely to wipe out any saving you made and then some. It's like buying a derelict house to flx up and flip, then googling for builders and such instead of doing the work yourself or having good connections, all profit likely flies out the window. If it was going to be a simple and predictable mechanics expense you need to wonder why the seller didn't do that rather than take the auction hit...

Like my car just now needs maybe £300 of work to kill off an EML and bodge it's wing and bumper, but it's likely knocking £1000 off it's sale price. It makes no sense for me to send it to auction rather than pay for the fixes... unless I suspected they would cost more...

That and i've just seen too many copart listings with 'Contamination - Blood' as a label :eek:

I'm not saying you can't get a bargain at copart (you might luck into a repo/police seizure), but it's more somewhere I would shop for project cars than work vehicles.