As I wrote last week, Maire Anne and I had a great weekend in Vermont with Sharkie, the ’79 Euro 635CSi. We only used Sharkie for the drive because the weather forecast was too rainy to take the rust-prone E9, and because the big guy was at the house anyway, and that was only because this summer I thought about selling it. I’ve done this on several occasions and backed away each time (I bought the car seven years ago because I love its look, and that hasn’t changed one iota), but this time I’d organized the photos and videos, wrote my traditional exhaustingly-detailed warts-and-all description and posted the car at what I thought was a realistic and fair price of $15k on my Facebook page, Facebook Marketplace, the FB pages for The Vintage and Southeast Sharkfest, one of the E24 pages, and Craigslist. There was a lot of love and drool expressed for the car, but the for-sale posts produced only one real sale-related correspondence, and even that was the tenuous “If you still have it in six weeks, I’ll have the money.” I never heard back from the fellow about whether or not his ship came in. (One could make a “sharks in the water must have got him” pun, but that kind of lazy journalism is beneath me. Or above me. As much as I’m a bred-on-Saturday-morning-cartoons baby boomer, I could never go pun-for-pun with Mr. Peabody.)
With a lovely mini road trip under our belt, it seemed like a natural time to take stock of our relationship (obviously I’m talking about the car here, not my darling wife). Other than a vibration almost certainly caused by a bent rear wheel, old tires, a few minor rattles, and the need for a retrofitted heater core shut-off valve, there’s nothing glaringly wrong (still talking about the car). I continue to love the way it looks (really, I could be talking about either one here), but I just don’t see a big road trip in its near future (definitely the car). Given the choice between making another run at trying to find a new home for it while it’s still at the house or driving it out to the rented warehouse space in Monson and leaving it there until spring (THE CAR!), I opted for the former. (And thus we see the danger of referring to people or things by pronouns or indefinite articles instead of naming them. Damn it, my high school English teacher was right.)
So I tried what I did this summer, but with the price lowered to $12,500. This time I bypassed Facebook Marketplace and its incessant “Is it available?” non-messages and posted the car only on my own page and to FB groups, adding the BMW 2002 Cars For Sale and the local Nor’East 02ers page. Again, there were lots of ooohs and aaahs, folks tagging friends of theirs, and people saying “It’ll be gone in a day,” but there wasn’t a single serious inquiry.
Selling a car, any car, is challenging, but particularly so for one that has caveats like Sharkie (wrong drivetrain, evidence of accident and bodywork), as many people with the money to buy have been conditioned over the years that the only best-of-the-best investment-quality cars are worth buying, and many folks of more limited means have sipped the trickle-down Kool-Aid. A few years back, I wrote a detailed two-part how-to-sell-a-car article for Hagerty (part 1 and part 2). I think about it like this: If you need to sell a car, putting it on an auction platform like eBay or BaT makes sense because an auction enters you into a process at the end of which there’s a sale, provided that the car meets reserve if there is one, and that the winning bidder follows through. In contrast, classified ads have no such process. You can try to set the price at some value designed for wiggle room, or set it low enough to nearly guarantee that the first person who sees it will buy it, but it’s usually lengthy and always a pain. I’ve had some success selling cars by floating them for sale on my Facebook page like this, as many folks in the community both know me and have seen the cars at The Vintage. But with zero inquiries at $12,500, the next step down is $10k, and when I’m about to price a car so low that if I saw it for that price, I’d buy it, it gives me pause.
So I pulled back and opted for plan B. This morning, I had a lovely drive in Sharkie through mid-October New England foliage to the Monson warehouse. Unlike the trip to Vermont which had only ten miles of interstate, this was a solid hour on the Mass Pike, which allowed the big sixer to do what it does best.
Back in ya go, big fella.
Once out there, I briefly considered grabbing the Bavaria, as it has some needs and also has come onto my radar as a car whose usage has dropped and thus maybe I should consider finding it a new home, but instead I swapped Sharkie for the FrankenThirty, which I’d run out to Monson the week before last and made a snap decision to bring Hampton the ’73 2002 back home for a bit. The E30’s needs are, of course, endless, and keeping busy right now is a good thing for me. Plus, when it’s home, I have no qualms about it sitting outside.
If someone responds seriously to Sharkie’s for-sale post, I can still always pull it back out of the warehouse. But I think that’s unlikely to happen. It’s best when these things have a natural rhythm. I was ready with the surfboard, but the wave never came in.
Hey, at least I wasn’t eaten by a shark :^)
—Rob Siegel
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