[champignon]

I've settled into a routine of poring over the online sales ads for used 1-Series, 1M, M3, and Z3/M Coupes that one can find for sale on the various websites such as ebay, Autotrader, CL, and occasionally others such as cargurus and cars.com. I'm not really in the market this instant, due to constrained storage space (and maybe also too much money already tied up in cars :-) ) but you never know.

I am, in all honesty, amazed at how many of these cars just sit and sit and sit for many weeks, many months, even a couple of years, never selling, or appearing to sell (if you can believe the seller) then mysteriously reappearing for sale by the same seller/dealer a short time later, usually for exactly the same price or very very close.

Sometimes it is because a seller expects to get reimbursed for modifications done to the car, even though in the eye of most "collectors," bone stock cars are preferred and anything changed deserves a deduction in the price. Sometimes it is because the seller searched very hard for a car with a particular set of features (exterior color, suspension, stereo, etc.) that he feels makes the car worth more, while not realizing that to many potential buyers those same features aren't worth very much. And sometimes it is just the "overpriced turkey" phenomenon, that term having been used once by a realtor I was working with to describe certain houses perpetually on the market.

All of these above explanations merely illustrate a failure on the part of the sellers to realize that cars, like anything else, sell based upon supply and demand. Any desirable car (with the possible exception of some that are extremely rare and stratospherically priced) should sell within a month or so, in my opinion, if they are priced to the market. That market might be really really low for something like a 5 year old high mileage Chevy Aveo, but there is an equilibrium of supply and demand for most anything. Sometimes you find (unintentionally) revealing text in sales listings, stuff like, "I'm only asking what I owe, so the price is firm," the assumption being that the buyer will pay more for the car now that he knows the seller owes more on the car than the car is worth . . . .

How long would you sit on a car you wanted to sell that you had up for sale and that was not selling? If I was selling it myself, I don't think I could wait more than a month, or if selling on consignment through a dealer, 3 months would be about tops for me, I think.