Buying a Truck at Auction
We were nervous. Very nervous.
We had NEVER spent this much money on a vehicle before. When you are trying to achieve financial independence by saving money, dropping roughly a whole years worth of SAVINGS on a thing that ‘usually’ depreciates in value is a confronting thought.
What if it’s a lemon? Why is the seller getting rid of it? Should we get a mechanic to check over it?
Plenty of things to worry about because buying at auction comes with a few risks:
– You don’t get to drive it before buying it! Yikes!
– You are able to start it and observe idling, but not drive anywhere
– There are no returns, no cooling off, if you win the auction, it’s yours.
So you better be sure that what you’re bidding on is what you really want. Having said that …. We totally winged it.
The only reason we were able to keep clicking the ‘bid’ button in the online auction is because of a justification that we reassured ourselves with…. All the drawbacks of an auction means there has to be a decent upside, otherwise why would anyone do it? The upside of course; price (or is it value?).
Auction houses are often where car dealers pick up their vehicles and then sell them on to retail customers at retail prices. So we figured that, even if we had the worst luck in the world, we might be able to do the same thing to get us out of trouble.
We didn’t know if this truck was going to work as the platform for our house truck, so we just had to take a chance. All the truck body builders we had spoken to told us they couldn’t give a quote until they saw the truck. So if it didn’t work out for some reason (and there was plenty of those), then theoretically we could always sell the truck on as a private sale.
That is as long as we didn’t discover the gear box didn’t work the moment we tried to drive it out of the lot!
There are a number of auction houses in Australia that sell off these fleet vehicles, often every month.
– Pickles
– Greys
– Lloyds
– Slattery
– Manheim
– Australian Frontline Machinery
We found the Pickles auctions were the most convenient for us because their auctions with the 4×4 trucks were located at Gateshead NSW. That’s around 2 hours north of Sydney, where we were living in our Coaster bus at the time.
So we could make a weekend of going to check it out! Take the coaster up and stay at the beach and go and have a look over this thing.
There were usually two or three Isuzu FSS550 coming up for auction each month. The odometer readings varied and the prices changed to suit. Though I’d happily the pay $8000 more for 100 000km less.
You have to register to buy at auction which involved uploading some ID documents and agreeing to the terms etc. We chose to sit the first one out and just watch, maybe bid while the price was still low to practice the process and make sure you knew what was going on. You don’t want to make any mistakes or stumble across nasty surprises!
At least that was the plan. After checking out the trucks up for auction there was one that seemed too good to pass up!
Our criteria was:
– Crew cab which seats 7 (the single cab has only 3 seats)
– Low km
– Registered
– Not from a mine
So against our plans, we started to bid, and bid, and bid. The general aversion to spending money that permeates anyone trying to save was running high. But we ended up winning! For $47000! It was only then that we found out the seller could withdraw it if the reserve wasn’t met, aaaaand of course, that’s what happened.
The heady mix of nerves and elation at winning quickly turned into disappointment. But we did learn that it was coming up at next months auction and maybe the seller would come down a bit to meet the market the second time around.
Sooo one month later ....
Round Two
Next month we drove up and parked our coaster around the corner from the auction house and bid again, this time with more confidence as we felt like we’ve done this before. And we won again! This time for $50000! Jumping out of the coaster, we rushed over to claim our prize.
Our FSS550 is item #4 on the live auction screen shot. It still didn’t meet reserve, but the seller met us in the middle this time. Out of interest, check item #7 – An NPS300 2011 that sold for $16000!
Signed some papers, drove to the bank, transferred the money and we were good to go within a few hours of the auction ending. Which was lucky because we still had an 8 hour drive to go to make it up to our friends house. And …. I’d never driven a truck before!
Lucky the gear box seemed to work and we were able to pull out of the sale yard. Though there was plenty of crunching gears that comes with total novice truck driver.
The dream was off to a good start!
And we started planning straight away!
