Property Point

I bought a car the other day and, as a sales person, it was an interesting experience.

I don’t like spending a lot of money on cars and, as someone with a 16-year-old son, a 20-year-old daughter and a wife, there’s not much left for me anyway.

So I decided on a budget. That budget would have got me a brand new four-cylinder Japanese or Korean SUV but I wanted something a bit better, sportier, something a step up from my old Toyota Aurion that was about to die a painful, age-related death.

I narrowed down my search and worked out what sort of “next-level” car I could get second-hand that would be around the same price as one of the popular new SUVs that everyone drives.

As I worked through my research on cars, I decided it would be either a BMW, Mercedes or Lexus.

I worked out what I wanted in terms of engine size, age and kilometres on the clock. I narrowed it down to specific models of those brands and from there my priorities became low kilometres and full service history.

I finally decided that the car I wanted was a Lexus IS 350 F Sport. I would have loved to buy local and pick up one from a car dealer in Mackay but there were none here.

Only a handful in my price range were available in the country and I was struggling trying to find one with low-enough kilometres on the clock. It was starting to drag on.

Suddenly I saw an ad for a beautiful-looking silver one with 22,000 kilometres on the clock. It was a bit above what I had budgeted for, but I rang the dealer in Brisbane for a chat. There had only been one owner, a woman who had just had just turned 80.

So; the sporty, mid-sized, 3.5-litre Lexus sedan with leather everything that I wanted with 22,000km on the clock, one older female owner and log books with full service history. Tick.

The only problem was that the price was higher than my budget. So what did I do? I bought the damn thing, of course.

And that’s the sales lesson. I was a hot buyer for a Lexus IS 350 F Sport and I was willing to go outside my budget when I saw one that stood out from the crowd.

No sales person could have talked me into buying a car I didn’t want. But when you put an exceptionally good version of what I want in front of me at a price that’s slightly higher than I wanted to spend … what happens then? I adjust and pay the price.

I will write about the salesman in a future column but suffice to say there was no hard sell, just answering questions, making it easy, not being pushy, not giving me a reason to walk away.

He “sold” the car but he allowed me to discover it, see for myself what was special about the vehicle. And he defended the price. I knew he would let me walk away if I wasn’t willing to come reasonably close to the price.

But he knew, and I knew, that I wasn’t walking away. I’d found what I wanted and I was willing to stretch the budget a bit to get it. He had matched a good product with a keen buyer and defended the price. Our jobs aren’t that different.

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