Project Eric(a): Part 3

Subtitle: We don’t make things easy for ourselves, do we?

We’d slept on it over the weekend and the ex-MoD vehicle, up for auction on Tuesday morning, still looked too good to ignore, even taking into account the faff that would be involved in MoTing and registering and the unknown as to how long it would take DVLA to process the paperwork.

Then I saw a newly published advert for another vehicle, of the same make/model/spec, for sale in Blackpool. This one was a Wheelchair Adapted Vehicle (WAV) and was much higher mileage, but we could see it before buying, it would come with a warranty and, of course, it was registered so we would be able to drive it immediately.

A quick change of horse, then! We were going to go to Blackpool! Not until Tuesday though, because by now I was taking part in the Virtual Lakeland 50, I had 9.4 miles to run on Tuesday morning and I didn’t want to have to come up with a suitable and appealing route in a strange place. Bertie was duly packed for a couple or three days by the sea and arrangements were made to see friends in the area.

My run on Tuesday morning happened very early, because I’d been awake since 3am when I’d had the sudden flash of realisation that we were backing the wrong horse and that the ex-MoD vehicle was the vehicle we should have gone for.

I was back from my run at 7am and I woke Mick with the news of my early-hours realisation. “Are we too late to change our minds?” he asked. Bearing in mind that the auction for the ex-MoD vehicle was starting at 9am and that we hadn’t lined up a broker to buy it for us (the auction house currently being closed to the public), I opined that we were. Thus, at 9am we were on the phone to the dealer in Blackpool to double check, before we travelled, that no-one had snuck in and bought ‘our’ car from under us. They had. What a blow!

It was now gone 9am and our fall-back option was in an auction that had already started. Cue half an hour of headless-chicken activity: confirming with the broker that our car was far enough down the running order to give us time to instruct a bid, followed by the swift signing of the brokerage contract and the transfer of a non-refundable sourcing fee* (the most off-putting element of the transaction). 

By lunchtime we heard back: our bid had not been successful.

The ex-MoD vehicle on which we were thoroughly outbid.

We didn’t need to return to the drawing board as we already had our fallback plan: another Expert (WAV) going under the hammer the very next morning. A lower spec vehicle than our top two choices, but (undoubtedly due to Coronavirus) there’s a scarcity of Expert Tepees on the market at sensible prices at the moment and this one had enough good points to make it a contender.

We instructed the broker as to our highest bid and set about waiting until Wednesday afternoon for news.

The news was good! We had bought a car. A car that we had never seen, and wouldn’t yet see for another week or two after paying for it, but at least the period of the full-on search had been short (and we secured it for £400 less than our highest bid, which was a bonus).

 

Eric(a)

 
(*The broker’s sourcing fee gave us unlimited bids over an unlimited period and would also have covered us giving them our criteria and setting them on the task of doing the searching. Because they are a high-volume customer of the auction house, they pay much lower fees than the general public. The sourcing fee we paid to the broker plus the reduced auction house fee came to slightly less than the auction fee we would have paid if we’d been able to attend the auction and buy for ourselves. The off-putting factor was that, given our timescales having already sold our old car, if we weren’t successful in buying at auction, we were looking at writing off a chunk of money if we were then to buy elsewhere.)