Tuesday 5th February

Cold, just a bit, I have never seen snow come sideways through the auction at SMA Leeds before.
A hall full of cars today which is pretty usual for Leeds, with offerings from TCH, Motability, Europcar, VW UK, MNH, Hitachi and plenty of dealer and company direct cars.

Despite freezing temperature there was a pretty good buzz, and people had definitely come to buy. Unfortunately the vendors and buyers had different ideas of what the cars would be sold for and I don’t think I have seen so many provisional bids for a while. There were a few big supermarkets getting frustrated that bids £200 behind Clean were not buying average cars. There were a few privates at the sale but I saw no one willing to join in the bidding.

There were two halls running as usual, one fleet and the other part exchanges, and I have to say the part exchange hall had 10 times more the activity than the fleet one.

There was nothing very special there today apart from a M3 Monte Carlo which had lots of attention but failed to get to CAP Clean.  Apart from that it was an average bunch in average condition at the best. I stood with a buyer from xxxxxx for a while who had an auction sheet with the printed £ damage prep value on it, and every car on every page had a damage value against it. Golf, late plate cars struggled again today.
A couple of sole traders I talked to both said the same thing , that the job of getting part exchanges out of dealers is becoming harder by the month as more sign up to auction programmes instead.

Every time I go to auction now I hear more credible comments about CAP, today a large supermarket said to me that CAP has become fact and others just a reference.

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