Following some advice here, I got an appraisal at CarMAX. I thought you'd all be interested in what I found:
On KBB, my 02 Box with tip is estimated at roughly
retail $32,000
private party $29000
tradein $26000
At CarMAX, I search their database for similar cars and they are selling from $29,900 to $33,000.
The salesperson explained a couple of items to me:
- they only mark up cars $1500-2000 of their cost, no matter how cheap they get em (pass the savings on to you!)
- they have very stringent quality requirements
- when they receive Porsches, they average $3500 in reconditioning costs even if they arrived in very good condition. They recondition them no matter what, some items required by law (brakes), and some items according to their own policy.
CarMAX appraised my car at $21000. :ah:
So given what they said, you might expect that they would resell my car for maybe $26,500. This is way under what they are selling similar Boxsters for, so from that I would really expect that they would sell this for at least $29k and would be marking it up at least $5000.
So, it was a pretty disappointing visit to CarMAX. EXCEPT that the story has a silver lining!!! You see, when I parked my car out front I put the "For Sale" sign on it (figuring that all the other people are there to buy a car, right?). And as I was leaving the store, someone stopped me and is interested in buying the car! So next week we have a test drive, and we'll see how that goes.
In conclusion - CarMAX doesn't offer good trade in values, but its a heck of a place to hang a "for sale" sign.
Cheers!
- Xavier
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