DESPITE THE downturn, some dealers are advertising cash deals to purchase used cars from customers. Dealers expect that a stronger demand for used cars in the coming months will offset the fall in sales and help create much-needed custom.
Several dealers are now offering cash deals and one, Dermot Wallace, who runs a long-established south Dublin dealership, says he has had a strong customer response.
“The used car market is going to come back and get better,” says Wallace. “There are a lot of people who want to sell for various reasons: they are in financial trouble, they are stressed or they have lost their jobs. For us there are always cars that we are willing to take in and there will soon be a shortage of good used cars because new cars simply aren’t selling.
“In the last 75 to 80 enquiries, we have had people enquiring about moving down, sideways – nothing is off limits. There are people trying to get out of expensive cars for €100,000-plus to ordinary cars for €3,000; two- and three-car families are reducing to one car.”
Wallace says the demand for large SUVs has almost gone and that, apart from the likes of Range Rovers and BMW X5s, there is no demand for the rest. “All of the bolt-on 4x4s, as I call them – the likes of Ssangyongs for example – are finished.
“People often want to sell their cars but they also want to get into something else. Many of the people we’re dealing with bought cars when everyone was going mad. I don’t think that market will ever come back or should be allowed to come back.
“Importers and manufacturers are going to have to carry the new stock and the demonstrators. The block exemption rules [forcing dealers to expand and renovate their premises] should have never applied to a country of our size. They lost the run of themselves. If you asked the main dealers whether they would do what they had to do again, they would say no.”