Carmax vs Private Sale -- worth the effort?

[Anonymous]

Has anyone taken a vehicle to Carmax to get an offer and ended up selling that car via private sale for more money? If so, did the price increase enough to make it worth the effort?

DH is thinking about selling his car. It's in great condition and we'd like to get the most for it, of course, but especially during the pandemic we don't want a bunch of unknown strangers coming and going.

[Anonymous]

I don’t think it’s worth it, but YMMV. Dealers are offering pretty high amounts right now because they have no inventory.
We have worked with car2go and Carmax and I prefer Carmax. Have also heard good things about carvana for selling recently.

[Anonymous]

I looked at carvana recently and they're giving me $2k more than carmax, def worth checking out. resale for cars right now is so high, to me it's not worth the effort of doing it privately

[Anonymous]

I got a Carvana estimate and the dealer tried to low-ball me but ended up meeting the Carvana offer. Get it before you go so you have it.

[Anonymous]

It wasn’t that much effort for us to sell private sale. We had the carfax report, posted it for a fair price on Facebook marketplace and said no tire kickers. We had maybe 5 offers of full cash and sold it to the first guys who test drove it. They brought a mechanic friend and also plugged in a computer to see what errors showed up. We got about 4K more than carmax offered us.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It wasn’t that much effort for us to sell private sale. We had the carfax report, posted it for a fair price on Facebook marketplace and said no tire kickers. We had maybe 5 offers of full cash and sold it to the first guys who test drove it. They brought a mechanic friend and also plugged in a computer to see what errors showed up. We got about 4K more than carmax offered us.

I will say that I’m female and wasn’t willing to test drive with people though. Dh did all of that.

[Anonymous]

I've sold two cars in the last year and I just got quotes from Carvanna and Carmax and compared the two of them. I think it also depends on the price of your used car, if you are selling a car that is worth $10,000 or so, it is always going to be more difficult to sell it private party.

[Anonymous]

We just sold a car with Carvana. So easy and minimal effort. Got the same price as we would in a private sale. The actual transaction with the Carvana rep took ask of 10 minutes and we got a check on the spot. Would do it again.

[Anonymous]

Private sale is easy if you price it right and screen the people.

[Anonymous]

Carmax gave me 12k for my car. I didn't expect it, I would have asked for 12k on the private market and hoped for something with an 11. It was all so easy.

[Anonymous]

From my experience, Carvana is offering the most for newer used autos, but it doesn’t hurt to get bids from a bunch of them. For older cars, however, I think you’re better off going private sale.

[Anonymous]

Check out Inride.com they give $500 more than Carmax.

[Anonymous]

I recently sold a car private in 2 days at the high end of the Kelly value. I didn’t bother with Carmax or Carvana as I was satisfied with the price and convenience.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I looked at carvana recently and they're giving me $2k more than carmax, def worth checking out. resale for cars right now is so high, to me it's not worth the effort of doing it privately

+1. We did caravana and it was so easy and the price they offered were good. Maybe we could have made 500$-1000$ more on a private sale but we would have spent a lot of time handling various buyers and making time for them to view/test drive the car, checking to make sure their payment was valid etc. we actually posted our car for sale and some of the potential buyers were offering to “negotiate” for ridiculous prices so we just went with carvana. Our time is too valuable to spend it looking for a great buyer when carvana was a good one.