Private sale or part-exchange: which gets car sellers the best price?

It’s an age-old debate - do you get a better price from selling a used car privately, or are you better off taking the best offer from a dealer selling you a new one? 

Auto Express advice has always been to weigh up the overall cost to change, and that holds as true today as it ever has. However, new numbers from market data specialist UKVD, provide a fascinating insight into how the type of car you drive can make a significant difference to the sums.

To test the market we took a random sample of 1,000 registrations from the car sales listings on our parent site Carwow, and asked UKVD to provide us with their latest market estimates of part-exchange and private sale prices.

The data confirms our general perception that private sales are the most cost-effective way to sell a car. The average difference between part-ex and private sale prices achievable by used car sellers across a wide range of makes and models from budget to luxury, comes out at £407 in favour of the private sale. That’s an average bonus of almost 4 per cent on the selling price. 

That said, in certain cases the figures showed you can get a marginally better price for your old car via a part-exchange trade with your dealer. Typically these will be high-demand variants of mainstream models that the dealer can flip quickly. For some variants of in-demand used models, such as the Nissan Micra and Qashqai, Mercedes C180, Ford Fiesta, Vauxhall Astra, MINI One, SEAT Ibiza and Ford Focus, you could do up to 10 per cent better on your used car price by going down the part-exchange route with your dealer.

Mileage plays an important role too, as dealers look much more favourably on fresher part-exchange cars that will be easier to sell on. UKVD’s price data shows that on average, as mileage increases, so does the benefit of selling it privately. For example, across our 1,000-car sample, the average benefit in selling privately at 5,000 to 10,000 miles is less than a two per cent boost in the sale price. If you’re approaching 50,000 miles then you can make almost 6 per cent more through a private sale, but once over that 50k hump the benefit slips back to 4 per cent all the way up to cars that have covered over 100,000 miles. 

Sadly, our data doesn’t reveal exactly which variants of popular models generate the best part-ex prices from dealers, and it’s rarely straightforward to go and ask. New car sales staff are trained to make sure they’ve taken you a long way down the route towards purchasing a new model before they’ll commit to a valuation on your part-exchange, while if you’re chopping-in one used car for another at a non-franchised dealer, the figure may vary significantly depending on what you’re looking to buy. It’s worth mentioning too, that dealing with even relatively small percentages means the added cash value of selling an expensive premium or luxury model privately could add up to thousands of pounds in some cases.

Of course, while some buyers will look only at the cold hard cash when they’re changing cars, others take a much more pragmatic approach by factoring-in the hours of hassle you can avoid by shaking the dealer’s hand on a part-ex trade. What price would you put on someone else doing all the advertising, handling all the phone calls and dealing with tyre kickers on your behalf? 

A recent survey by Auto Express revealed the most common problems faced by private car sellers, with low offers and haggling coming out on top, followed by time-wasters not showing up for appointments and disputes with buyers over the vehicle’s condition. 

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