New car brokers - would they work in Ireland?

Padraig Mor

In the UK there are dozens of new car brokers around, all of whom purport to be able to get you the best price for your new car. In essence, they do the haggling for you and offer cars at a set, low, price – but you still get your car from a main dealer, as per usual. They have obvious advantages: you get a great price and you don’t have to haggle. You can also do the whole lot online if you want, without ever entering a salesroom. If I were buying new in the UK, it’s definitely the route I would take. However, you are going to get the lowest possible price for your trade in – if the dealer will even take it. There appears to be two different models.

Model 1
The most popular type, e.g. www.dealdrivers.co.uk, www.motorlogix.com. The broker deals exclusively with one (occasionally more) dealer per marque, having negotiated the best percentage discount they can get. You can order the exact spec you want and know in advance how much it will cost.

Model 2
Competitive bidding, e.g. www.broadspeed.com, www.autoebid.com. Here, the broker has a large network of dealers for each marque whom they shop around to get the best price for your individual car. The prices are generally lower than the other model but, from what I can gather, they are essentially betting that they can find a dealer with a car to your spec already in stock that they want to shift – IMO if you don’t want a ‘standard’ spec, they may well come up empty handed.


Would brokers like these work here? Or is Ireland too small - are there too few dealers to ensure sufficient competition to get the best prices? Would Irish dealers and/or public be ‘suspicious’ of such a broker?

TomMc

No reason why it wouldn't work, in theory at least. In Ireland though, the majority of people who buy new are probably trading in their old car, so this would limit things in practice. Having said that there are independent dealers who source new cars for long-standing customers, making them brokers of sorts.

tw0nk

If this happened in Ireland, I would be very worried that these brokers would start doing the same thing that some garages in Ireland already do, ie price fixing and the customer would know no better.

That said, I do like the idea in principle, that all the legwork is taken out of the task, although one of the best parts of buying a car is constantly looking through carzone and going for test drives and haggling etc.

-Chris-

I was approached by one of these brokers. I thought it was an interesting service - for a set fee he'd do the legwork for you.
I especially thought it would appeal to people who don't like to, or want to, haggle. Also for people who are suspicious of or intimidated by dealers.

The general consensus internally however was that he didn't add much value to the transaction.

Personally, I wouldn't get into that line of work because the amount of work involved in it - helping someone spec up the car they want, travelling to the dealers to negotiate it (including a sight-unseen value for the trade-in), arriving at best price, bringing in the trade-in to confirm its value, holding the customer's hand during the order and delivery process etc. - would necessitate a fee of a couple of hundred euro.
Essentially I think my fees would eat up the additional discount I negotiated, making me unnecessary!