Selling Your Truck to a Dealership: What You Need to Know

We talk about selling your car to a dealership a lot, but what we actually mean is selling your vehicle. Car is a friendlier, more familiar term but we buy trucks, SUVs, vans and pretty much anything on four wheels.

 

Today we’ll discuss trucks in particular as they are still very much sought after. Both by us to buy and people who want to sell and buy.

Clean Your Truck Ready for Sale

There’s a lot of sheet metal in the average truck and all of it needs to be clean and tidy when it comes time to sell.

 

We recommend everyone clean their vehicle before trying to sell it or before taking pictures for the ad. The cleaner it is, the more desirable it looks, with obvious consequences.

 

Clean the inside and out, and clean the wheels, the engine bay, and the truck bed. Everything.

 

1. Remove All Personal Items

When you’re cleaning out the interior, remove any personal items. Make sure to remove your sunglasses, any spare clothes, paperwork not related to the truck, tools, breakdown or emergency bag and anything else you store.

 

2. Wipe Navigation Data

While you’re there, wipe the navigation data from your truck. It can show where you live, where you work, where you shop for groceries and anywhere you needed directions too.

 

If you sell your truck to our dealership, we’ll wipe this for you but it’s something you really should remember to do yourself, especially if you decide to sell your truck privately!

 

There should be a factory reset option within the navigation settings. Use that once you know you won’t be using navigation before selling your truck.

 

3. Make any small repairs

There is a balance to be struck between spending money on the truck before selling it and losing money and making it more sellable.

 

We would suggest small repairs like replacing blown bulbs, replacing wipers, fixing obvious scratches and dings and things that will impact how someone sees your truck are worthwhile.

 

Other repairs can perhaps wait. Anything that won’t impact someone’s decision to buy or the price you’ll get can be safely left alone.

 

 

4. Prepare the Paperwork and Keys

You should ideally have both sets of keys, the manual, service history and any maintenance or repair paperwork for your truck ready for the sale.

 

Make sure you have as much of this as you have, especially the service history. You can usually buy replacement keys and owner’s manual online but weigh the cost of replacing them before buying.

 

5. Make Sure You Have the Title

If you bought the truck on finance, your lender would have retained the title until you settled the loan. Make sure you got it back from them before you try to sell your truck.

 

If it’s still under finance, sell your truck to our dealership and we’ll work with you and your lender to settle the finance and transfer the title over to us.

 

That’s not typically something you can do with a private sale, only with a dealership.

 

If you're ready to sell your car in Southern Ontario, we'd love to buy it! simply fill in the form below to get started.