The Life and Times of a Jeep

This blog is so old, that I started it before I bought my Jeep way back in 2005 (Click here is the post I made announcing the purchase). So the events of last week are a great excuse to dust off Ye Olde Blog.

Well, all good things must come to an end. And last week, I finally sold my 15 year old Jeep TJ Sport. It had been sadly underused for the past few year since I bought my Focus. At first, I thought I would hold onto it and keep it as a "for fun" vehicle, and while it was a fun vehicle, I realized I couldn't justify keeping it when it mostly sat in the driveway, having the battery slowly die from under use. Also, it way in the way when I wanted to put my car in the garage.

So after procrastinating for about two years, I finally ordered the Used Vehicle Information Package. Then I took it into a shop to see if it could get its safety certificate without any work (or at least I would know exactly what needed to be done to it). It didn't pass safety, but it only needed a new muffler and some rust fixed on the front fenders.

My initial thought was to sell it for $3600, if I could get it safetied, but since I was going to sell as-is, I rethought and was going to lower it to $3200. Then I looked more closely at the other Jeeps of the same vintage on kijiji, and while most had lots of after-market work done to them, they were asking for much higher than I was thinking. So, I thought "what harm could it do" and went with the higher $3650. And, oh boy, did that make for a busy sales day.

So I wrote the kijiji post on Sunday evening, but apparently as a new user (I'd never used kijiji before for anything), the post needed to be verified before it went live. But I could still link to it. So I put it up on Facebook to see if any of my friends wanted it first. A couple signs of interest, but ultimately, no sale.  The kijiji post went live at about 5am on Monday, and by the time I woke up at 7am, I already had two messages waiting for me.  The first just asked if he could see it, and the second asked some more questions about the condition of the Jeep. The first guy just said he could meet me at 4:30 that afternoon and nothing else was said.  The other guy also ended up wanting to see it, but since I wanted to give the first guy the chance, I told second guy to come at 5:30.

Well, to make a long story slightly shorter, the second guy became a little more insistent, letting me know he was coming in from Toronto and was heading into KW early to beat traffic, so he could be here earlier. Not wanting to have conflicting viewings, I held firm to my original 5:30 plan. But eventually he said he could be there by 3:30, so I figured at this point it sounded like a sure sale and said ok to 3:30.  Then he hit traffic and Waze told him it would be about 4... then 4:15... then 4:20. It's at this point he offered $100 just to hold it for him to see and if he didn't end up buying it, the $100 was mine to keep. So, I promptly told the first guy (who I hadn't heard from since the morning) that I couldn't meet him until 5:30.

Keep in mind, at this point, I've had about a dozen other messages from the ad, ranging from "I'm very interested, call/text me at xxx-xxxx" to "what's your rock bottom price?" (that last one I didn't even bother to respond to... you aren't going to get me to negotiate with myself within the first few hours of the post being live).

To make a long story a medium story, the guy who came in from Toronto ended up buying with cash for asking price. So, I immediately message the first guy saying it was sold, and I get a angry message back from him telling me that he was also coming in from Toronto and he took off early from work and was bringing a friend to drive his car back. I felt a bit bad, but in the end, I wasn't going to hold it all day long while I had so many other offers coming in.

One of the lessons here is that Jeeps in reasonably good condition command a relatively high price in the used car market, and I could have gotten more, if I was inclined to play that game (which I wasn't). In fact, after I messaged one of the other people telling him it was sold, he straight up offered $4000 if it wasn't physically gone yet (it was by then).

In the end, I'm happy I finally sold it. I will probably miss it some days, but again, since I wasn't using it, I don't feel like I'm missing out. The guy who bought it was buying it for his son (who came with his dad to see it... he looked to be about early 20's), and they had a whole family of Jeeps... so that was kind of nice.