The process of used car appraisal might vary from one to another slightly with every individual dealership, but the principles on which the trade-in process is erected are more or less the same.
The entire process will usually take around fifteen to thirty minutes depending on the crowd that is waiting ahead of your chance. Every appraiser will have his own way of appraising. While some will delve deeper into the details, others might have a walkaround your car before giving the final statement. One has to remember that finally an appraisal is nothing but someone’s opinion about how much worth is your car. The experts in the Riverside VW say that there is still no scientific method to find out the true value of a used car.
How the Appraisal Process Works in a Car Dealership
Every dealer would like to know at the beginning of the car buying process if you have a car to trade. Once that is known, the process of appraisal will start following four major steps, that we would describe for you in brief.
1) Handing Over the Keys to the Appraiser
Once you go for the appraisal of your old car the first thing it would start with is handing over the car keys to the appraiser to help them retrieve the basic information from your vehicle. At this point, it is recommended to hand them over a pair of spare keys rather than the one you use. With that the appraisers will continue the appraisal process by writing down the information including the make, the model, the year of manufacture, and mileage that would help in determining the evaluation process.
2) The “Silent Walk-Around”
The next phase of appraisal will continue with the appraiser taking a walk around your trade-in vehicle touching every dent, pointing out every little deformity like a crack, a scratch, a worn tire, or without saying a word. For the car owner the best response to this silent walkaround should be a dispassionate silence from their side as well, and not to get perturbed by every little gesture of dissatisfaction they express, to make the car owners feel that their car is not up to the mark.
3) What Does a Car Appraiser Look for?
If the appraiser is good enough at what he does, his walk around the entire car will come up with the detail he would ask for. He will most probably scan the vehicle identification number (VIN) to check its history to make sure that the vehicle has a clean background. As shared by the Riverside VW dealership experts, he will search with the information he has gathered about your car to know the current used car market value and also few other current values that are running in the market on the vehicle he has been appraising.
4) Receiving the Real Value of Your Vehicle
After all this procedure, the used car manager will call the relevant staff to ahead with the car deal you are ready to sign for. They will let you know in detail about the term payment, the cash down amount and finally present their assimilated figures to you.