by ACourtney » Thu Apr 09, 2015 9:25 am
In some ways it would be nice to see him get the asking price. Its just that, as we know all too well, our cars are greatly undervalued. Especially if you compare them with a Mini Marcos in equivalent condition.
I can see his logic, he lays it out in the description. Remember, he is coming from the Mini restoration scene and nowadays Mini owners are generally happy to pay to have things done properly as they will see a return in the value of their car.
As he lists it out, it has a 1.3 MG Metro engine - something that many Mini owners would pay around £500 for alone. It also has the 4 pot calipers, again something that Mini owners are happy to spend a couple of hundred pounds on. The car is correctly registered as a Midas and has a V5C - so thats £450 worth of IVA test avoided. He also mentions the subframes, which if in good order (it has been stood in dry storage for most of its life so they should be) would also add to the value of the car. Adding that lot together, then a realistic value should be of the order of £1200 to £1500, but is it likely to fetch even that? I think that it would need to have an MOT on it to fetch that in the current market.
This guy is a trader and will want to turn a profit. He took a risk on buying the car because there was a question mark on its ownership and it hasn't run for more than a decade. Apart from the £820.99 he paid for it on ebay, he will have paid out £25 to get the V5C and also the cost of collecting the car from Solihull. So it has probably already cost him around a grand so far. What is not clear is whether the car is a runner, or if all he has done is wash the dirt off the car since collecting it. It does seem to me that £2.5k is a bit, shall we say, optimistic.
If he has got it running then he should MOT it. The lack of interior trim shouldn't put people off, but an MOT certificate will go a long way towards removing any other doubts.