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      05-07-2012, 05:10 PM   #8
Pamlico
Second Lieutenant
United_States
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Drives: 1M
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Rochester NY

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I live in western NY and ended up selling my John Cooper Works Mini Cooper S to someone living in New Mexico, so while not exactly the same situation as yours, I can tell you how we (the remote purchaser and I) did things.

I initially advertised the car on Craigslist and within a couple of days received a call from someone who said he'd been searching for a Works Cooper for some time. After an hour's conversation he said he wanted to buy the car. I asked him if he didn't want to look at it in person before making the offer and that's when I found out he was about 1800 miles away.

While this person didn't request an inspection, once you find a potential car I'd imagine you could call the BMW dealer in the area the car is located and ask them if they could inspect the car for you. You could ask the seller to bring it to the dealer and you could pay by credit card.

In my experience we were able to do all the paperwork via fax and overnight delivery. Everything went exceedingly smoothly. The one leap of faith involved may have to do with payment. You have the $$, he has the title/car and you need to swap them. In our exchange, he wired the total payment to our bank (it's a common process and should be able to be accomplished in the same day). Once the money was in our account I faxed him a copy of the title and then immediately sent it off via FedEx and he had it the next day.

In terms of getting the car from NY to NM, the purchaser hired a transport company. A few days later the driver showed up and the car was loaded onto a car transport and it was at the purchaser's house in about a week. End of story.

I believe there are car transport companies listed on eBay. I have no way of knowing if this is accurate, but I was told by the truck driver that it's best to deal directly with the transport company because some of companies you see on eBay are brokers who act as a middleman between you and the trucking company and you end up paying about double what you'd pay if you eliminated the broker. The guy who I dealt with used a division of MGM (the entertainment company). It seems they have to move a lot of stuff around the country for movie making, etc and they used to deadhead back after making the delivery to the movie set, etc. Eventually they realized they could make some $$ if they contracted to move vehicles on the return. The downside is that you may need to wait a few days for the truck to get enough vehicles going your way after it's picked up from the seller. The driver who picked up the Mini told me he's transported a number of vehicles for some big show business names so I'd assume he'd get the stink eye if he messed up those cars. I don't know if MGM still has this division, but there are a good number of companies that transport high end vehicles so getting it to you in good shape shoudn't be much of a problem. Try to find a company that puts the car into a trailer for shipping.

Good luck.
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