Just placed a bid on a 3.5 charger and immediately regretted it.

Yeah, the 3.5 is kind of a turd. 3.6 is way better, but still not without problems.

Looking at NYPD surplus on property room. These cars are so beat up. They take the fascia and tail lights off of most of their surplus cars too.
2012 Impala , 39k miles, CEL, missing front end, generally beat up and torn apart.

2015 Taurus 67k miles, same story.
Clearly being an NYPD patrol car is an ill fate for a vehicle. What a toilet that lot is.

Man, those things are beat. Surprised the cv's listed seem to be in (mostly) one peice.

Man, there was an 08 P71 over here on auction the other week. All it needed was a shifter cable and a cluster, around 80k. Red and silver orero (Ala Lincoln RI police), but it went for $650. Shoulda snatched that up as a project car. I bid until like $625 too damnit.

Do you get that strange feeling of regret too when that happens? There are some cars that I just barely missed I'll never forget.

Yep I know exactly what you mean. Dude this thing was a cherry too, I was stupid not to go all in. It was an emergency response unit that didn't get driven much and looked like there wasn't a speck of rust.

Oh well, onto other things I suppose. Take the prior experiences as a mental note for next time

Yes exactly. There are some cars like VoodooChild describes that I missed and will never forget.
But lately I've experienced the opposite bidding online. I usually bust out laughing when I see the closing price is 2-3x what I was considering.
Like that Charger I bidded on. 13 year old, 166k mile 3.5 V6 stripper ex-patrol car that is in unknown mechanical condition besides "starts with boost."
And get this, $4200 out the door! Ahahahahahahahahaha
Govdeals executives must be laughing their way to the bank. I think I may as well just remove that site from my favorites, its completely busted.

What you describe is so so common on Charger auctions and GovDeals auctions in particular. Causing me to go WTF all the time!

I bid on PS, GovPlanet, and GovDeals regularly, my last purchase was a '10 P71 on GovDeals for 2125. Just picked it up yesterday, fine car drives well, no lag no rattles no pulls, 104K miles, half-SAP sort of good civilian driver ex-P71. Couple of paint rubs easily fixed, clean the interior, and it's good to go.

But that said, my eye suspects shill bidding in many many GovDeals auctions, much more so than Public Surplus, but not nearly as much as with live auctions. That's my main complaint with live auctions, the shills floating in the crowd who are sizing you up to see how high they can push you.

I tend to see more suspicious bids on GovDeals. Bids that go too high with too much time left on the clock. Undercutting bids when a rube bids too high on the last day, last hour, designed to jack his pay price up but not win. Cars that "sell" for too high, then are back on the market the next week. That sort of thing. I usually have to be very sly on GovDeals and always always on line in the last minutes if I want to win.

The city I live in definitely is doing something hinky with its auctions. I've never won a single one because they always "sell" for too much money. Usually the reserve prices are at retail or even higher. They just "sold" 3 2010-2013 Caprices on Public Surplus for way too much money because these are not desirable cars. The V6's went over 4 and the V8 over 6. Beat to crap cosmetically. This was 3 weeks ago and the cars are still sitting on the city lot. What sort of auction sale doesn't make you pick your cars up within about 10 days?

What I suspect is going on is a "no sale, didn't meet the reserve" switcheroo, in which the city agent places an absurdly high reserve based on some sort of high-end retail KBB calculation. This burns off all the real auction interest as ever higher bids go past normal wholesale prices and still fail to reveal the reserve. This clears the path for a shill buyer, an insider friend of the city agent who places the final "non-winning" bid at the very end of the auction, already knowing what all the other bids are from communication from the city agent conspirator.

This gives the shill the right of first refusal, and the city agent can opt to sell, or not, for the losing best reserve price, OR another price if agreed upon. The shill merely declares that "the car has additional faults" when they come for inspection, therefore they can't pay X as they bid on it, they must instead pay X-$1000, etc.. Conspirator city agent agrees, justifies it to her bosses that that's the best she could get, car is sold off and conspirators split the profits.

But in fairness, it was a GovDeals auction out of South Carolina where I won my armored car. My partner and I suspected all sorts of hinky monkey business with that one because it had like 6,000 views before closing and over a dozen questions from bidders across the country and even Canada. In the end, the seller goofed by scheduling the auction to close at 8:30 AM EST and no one got about of bed for it. We pulled all of my last minute tricks to fool the shills and outfox the competition and in the end won it for about $2500 less than we were willing to pay.

So even though I hate GovDeals, I have to admit that four out of my last five gets (2014 Explorer, 2 - 2010 Vics, and Armored Car) have been lower-than-expected GovDeals wins.

What I REALLY hate are the 20% fees the "live" auction lots are charging these days.

The shill bidding gets old. In one hand it makes you wonder why the auction places allow it to happen when it's obvious what's going on but then again if it does sell higher because of it they make more money and with online auction it's not that much work for them to re-list cars when the buyer doesn't follow thru.




That's what I did when I got my good P71. It went for more then I had planned on spending but I suddenly thought I might not get the chance to get one that nice again so I kept going. Then that other feeling hit- the WTF did I just do one. But that faded pretty quick LOL. It's still one of my favorite cars I have.






Yep, sometimes you have to wonder what people are thinking. What I really don't get is the people who over pay for normal cars that are everywhere. Like when you see a minivan with no rocker panels sell for more then what you could buy it for from a private seller and get the chance to actually test drive it!

The shill bidding is allowed to happen because it is the auction houses themselves that are doing it. The Cui Bono rule is in full effect here.

A friend and I who bid online at a local auction house, we don't prebid anything anymore. What we noticed is that the bids always get run up ahead of time and we are topped out at our limit. Can't tell me there are so many randomn bidders with the same top dollar in mind, especially when you do non-typical bid amounts. Somebody on the inside is running them up early, and hoping for a bidding war to push it even higher during the final hours.

Egg-zackully.

Your only defense, either in person or on-line, is to NEVER bid early. You must be present for the close of auction and you only bid as the clock is expiring. With PS you first bid must hit the books between 5:30 to the close of auction and 5:00 to the close. With Govdeals, the clock is different, it must hit between 3:30 and 3:00 minutes to close, but Govdeals has less clicks to process to submit a bid, so you can get them in faster.

And with both you must manually refresh your screen to see updates.

With live auctions I also NEVER inspect the car the day of auction, it signals to the shills what you're interested in. I go early and try to disguise the vehicles I like.

Further to the thread of rising prices, I note this blue 2009 SAP out of Washington that has hit $3500 with five days to go on its auction. Will likely reach 5k.

Yes, it's nice and its an SAP with only 246 hours against 101k miles, but still...

https://www.govdeals.com/index.cfm?fa=Main.Item&itemid=17784&acctid=8445

I don't know...I still think you guys are all just out of touch with what vehicles cost now.

Take a look at what else is out there for $3500, and you'll realize that the price of these Crown Vics aren't "inflated". It's just that cheap cars don't go as low in price as they used to. A $5k car IS a cheap car.

The insane surge new car market over the last 5 years has boosted the used car market. EVERYTHING is "inflated".