How to Negotiate a Car Deal

For a lot of people, the stress of negotiating a car deal is something they don’t look forward to.

But me? If I could create a business just around negotiating car deals, I would be thrilled.

Nothing excites me more than a battle of wits and to playing with numbers.

For me, the art of the car deal is being able to not give a shit about what you want.

Now, let me explain: It doesn’t mean that you can’t zero in, and say you want a BMW 530.

First off, in order to get the best car deal, you need to know the car first. When you want a car, you’ve got to choose three primary colors, and the optional equipment that suits you. I always suggest you to go the manufacturer’s website, take a look at all the options, packages, and price that car out.

Then, what you need to do is run a search all over the country. If it’s a used car, run a search all over the country on AutoTrader.com to get an idea of what the high and low is, so you know exactly what you should and shouldn’t be paying. There’s other great sites like TrueCar that give you prices that people pay. There are a lot of ways do to this.

But I have my own: When you want a new car, you have all the options, and then you need to understand, never tell them, payment.

You need to take a look and see what all the incentives are, how much money can you get back. You need to find out how far below invoice they are. What kind of year it might be. 10%, 15%, 5%, 4%, all changes during times of the year. End of the year, October, November, and December are the best months, because they’re clearing out old inventory, and they’re trying to hit quotas for the year.

That’s a lot of background information. What I want to talk about is negotiation.

You need to literally e-mail every dealership within 100 miles of your house on the exact car you want. You need to tell them, you need to take a look at lease rates. Let’s, say for instance: $4,000 down, 399 a month. Never put $4,000 down. Better to pay the money over a period of time.

For every 1,000, it’s $30. If you don’t want to put anything down, it’s $529 a month.

If you want to put $1,000 down, it’s going to be $30 less than that.

The key is walking away. Once you’ve talked to every single dealership, you get an idea of who the players are and who the players are NOT. And, if you do all the texts and e-mails, you don’t even need to go into the dealership.

Once you’ve figured out who your players are, then you play them against one another.

You low-ball. You keep low-balling. Even if you’re low-balling against nobody — this is something I’ll do all the time, I’ll literally e-mail a dealer and tell them it’s 550 a month, they’ll agree to it, and I’ll go, well the other dealer just came back at 530 a month. Are you willing to match it? You’ve got to be willing to take it as far as you can until they say no, and they will say no when you’ve pushed it too far. It’s the way you push it.

It’s all about how you push it. It’s all about how you do it. So, to me, I’d like to write him an e-mail to keep the best. Or send him a text saying, listen, I respect that you’ve been honest and up front with me and you’ve made it really simple and really easy. But this other dealer, because I believe in telling people I’m not going to buy a car from them, literally has pushed paint down a little further down. Obviously they want to sell a car today.

Say, “I don’t want to insult you, once again you’ve been fair. But, he’s pulled out another $15 out a month.”

When you do that, you’re talking a language. “I don’t want to insult you. I want to be fair to you. You treated me well. I could understand if you can’t do it, and I respect that, but if you could, you know I’d prefer your car over their car.”

That’s how you push them. Eventually they’re going to tell you no. But don’t forget, they’re in the game also. They’re going to tell you no or yes.

Also don’t forget that they’re in the game also because they fucking enjoy it. They enjoy the battle back and forth. They enjoy the whole thing. It’s a win for them. Whether the dealership makes a ton of money on the car or not, it’s a total win because that’s why they are involved in the game. They got involved in the game because they like to negotiate the game. So they’re there to negotiate with. Some dealers, like I said, will not play the game. They’ve got a certain quota, they’ve got a certain amount of money they need to make, it might be the wrong time of month, it might be the wrong day, they may have sold 10 cars that day and they don’t need to do a mini deal, but you’ve got to always tell them you’re going to thank them.