A number on your RAV4 is easy to give. Ours has to hold.
There is a quick way to price a RAV4 Hybrid. Read the badge, glance at the odometer, take something off for whatever nobody has looked at.
The slower way is to ask you first, so that what turns up on the day is what you already said was there.
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The figure in your hand
A number is easy to say and much harder to keep
If you have already been given a price for this car, the useful question is not whether it was a good one. It is what it was built out of.
With this car the offers tend to come to you rather than the other way round. It gets raised at the service counter while you are waiting. Somebody leaves a card under the wiper at the shops. A message arrives from a business you gave your details to a year ago and there is a figure sitting in it. None of those cost the person saying them anything, and not one of them came from somebody who has been underneath the car or looked in the boot.
That does not make any of them dishonest. It makes them unfinished. Nobody asked which version you have, what has been bolted to it, where it has been driven or who has been servicing it, so every one of those things is still sitting there waiting to be discovered later. Later usually means a stranger in your driveway on a Saturday morning with your car half sold, working through a list of reasons the figure they mentioned is not the figure they can do. You are the one standing there deciding whether to argue or to take it.
So we do it in the other order. The questions come first, on the phone, and the number comes after them. Then an inspector travels to your home or your work with your answers already written down, and the visit is there to agree that the car is what you said it is. The part that has nothing to do with the car gets handled at the start too. If there is finance or a novated lease on it we take the payout figure from your financier and settle it directly, and if the payout is bigger than the car is worth, that gap is written down and put in front of you before there is anything to sign.
Told now, not found later
The answers that keep a figure where it is
None of these decide whether we buy the car. They decide how much of it is still a guess by the time somebody knocks on your door.
- Is yours the all wheel drive one?
- A fair few owners are not certain, and the paperwork settles it in a minute. It is worth being sure before a figure gets attached to the car, because the version somebody assumed you have is the version they priced, and the driveway is an expensive place to correct that.
- Is there a second set of wheels in the garage?
- The originals that came off when something else went on, or a spare set sitting on their own tyres. They are yours to sell and they are the easiest thing in the world to forget, which is how they end up still in the garage a week after the car has gone.
- What is on the roof, and is it going with the car?
- Bars, a basket, a box, an awning, whatever has been up there for years. Both answers are ordinary. What is not ordinary is nobody asking, because roof gear either gets included in a price that never mentioned it or taken off a car after the price was agreed.
- Has it spent much time off the bitumen?
- The gravel road to a campsite, a boat ramp, a paddock every summer. Say so and the inspector spends real time underneath instead of glancing at it, which is exactly where a figure given from the driver's seat comes undone. It is not a mark against the car.
- Is the service book in the car, or in a drawer at home?
- Whoever has been doing it, a dealer or the workshop down the road, is not what anybody here is marking you on. What matters is where the record is on the day, because history sitting in the glovebox is history and history sitting in a kitchen drawer is a conversation.
- When you were given that figure, what were you asked?
- This is the one worth thinking about before you call anybody. If nobody asked you a single question, the number came off a badge and an odometer and it is carrying a guess about everything else. If they did ask, tell us what they wanted to know. Either way it tells us how much of your car has actually been looked at.
Once the questions are done
Three things that are settled before anybody knocks
- The figure is built out of your answers. So the visit is there to confirm it rather than to start it again. Nothing is being kept back to be produced on the day, and no part of the offer is waiting on something we have not asked you about yet.
- What is owed goes straight to the financier. A car loan or a novated lease, we take the payout from them and settle it ourselves. If it is bigger than the car is worth, you see that difference in writing first and you decide from there.
- You are not asked to prepare the car. No detailing, no tidy up job, no spending money on something you are about to hand over. Put the service book and everything that came with the car in one place and that is the whole of it.
After the first figure
Three things people check before they say yes
Can the number change after the inspector has been out?
It can, and there is one reason it does, which is the car turning out to be different from the one you described. If that happens you are told what it was and what it does to the figure, and you can say no and keep the car. Nothing moves quietly and nothing moves after you have agreed to it.
Somebody has already offered me more than you have. What then?
Then it may well be the better offer, and if it is, you should take it. What is worth doing first is putting the questions on this page to whoever gave it to you, because a figure nobody has tested is not a figure yet. One that stands up to them is worth having.
Will the battery be used to take money off once somebody sees the car?
Not as a precaution, no. It gets looked at properly on the day and it counts the way the body and the service history count, as one part of the car rather than the thing the whole figure hangs on.
Tell us about the car first and the figure comes after it.
Or call us on 03 9000 0075 and talk it through first.