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Do you remember your first car? The
one you wish you had never sold? Or maybe your mind keeps going
back to that dream car you could never afford. The lure of the
stylish cars of yesteryear has become a passion for many. Your
dream car may be in another city or another state. One of the fundamental keys to
making a successful �long-distance� purchase of a car is to
learn the car's history. The car history tells us where the car has
spent most of its life, which part of the country, which state,
if it�s been in the city or the country, in the snow or the sun.
If it traveled from coast to coast, how many owners it's had,
and how has it been cared for. Things like if it was garaged or
parked outside, was it serviced regularly, sporadically or not
at all. Was this maintenance done professionally at a garage, or
privately by the owner? You see the more we can find out about
the use and abuse the car has had the in it's past life the
better we are able to forecast how the car will perform if the
future when you own it.
Ah, this is all very well, I hear you saying, but how do
we actually find out this information - especially on a car
that's fifty years old? Well the good news is there are ways.
Certainly with newer cars our job is made a lot easier. Vehicles
produced after 1981 had their Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN)
recorded buy the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) almost from
the moment they first set a tire on a public highway. Every time
the car has any modifications made to the title, its recorded
buy the DMV. That includes, emissions and safety inspections as
well as change of owners and addresses. Abika.com is one of the
companies that supply these reports for a fee. Well I�m
here to tell you it's not, there are plenty of cases where a car
can appear to apparently have a clean title, even though it does
not. I have a car sitting outside my house right now that is a
case in point. The insurance company has totaled the car and
I�ve been paid for it, but I have the car and a clean original
title in my desk drawer, and I've done nothing dishonest to
obtain it. So let me reiterate that the system is NOT
infallible, and its still buyers beware!
So what else can be done? Well one of the simplest things is
one that is often overlooked and that is, to ask the seller to
fax you a copy of the title. Firstly, I believe this is good
practice anyway as you will be getting some kind of proof that
the seller is indeed most likely the legal owner of the vehicle
you are about to purchase, but secondly often times the name of
the prior owner can be found on this document. Sometimes this is
because the current owner has never transferred the vehicle to
their name, and other times, it's just because it's the way a
particular states does things. Either way, if you are lucky a
quick search through directory enquires will get you a phone
number and another chunk of the cars history will reveal itself
to you. I have known some clients manage to trace back two and
three decades of a cars history simply by asking this prior
owner what they can tell you about the person they brought the
car from � then doing a trace on that owner and carrying on down
the line. You won�t believe how gratifying it is to find out all
this buried information about a car you are about to own! That
being said, of course there are times when the news you uncover
is not what you want to hear - like the guy who tells you he
wrecked the car years ago and last saw it on the back of a
flat-bed truck on it's way to a wrecking yard! But in the big
picture when you think about it, it's all good news. Depending
on how much time you have to work with you can try to get the
title information from the DMV in the state in which the
vehicles last title was recorded and ask them to do a title
history search, or you can have a company like Abika.com do it
for you.
If the title turns out to be a dead end, the next step is to
use the services of a professional inspection company. Once
again here you will want to not just read the obvious from the
report, but read between the lines, try to learn what the
condition tells you about how the car has lived and been cared
for. (If you have problems with this, the above company has
consultants who can help you to decipher things) Other ways to
learn about the cars past come in the form of receipts for parts
and service records. Don�t think that because a car has been
fully restored this stuff isn�t important, it is and maybe even
more so. How else will you be able to tell how well a
restoration job was done unless you see the receipts and
cancelled checks for the parts and labor? Again, with these
receipts, pay attention to the quality of the parts used (look
for name brands), as well as the size of the bills for labor �
if possible call the body shop who did the paint job or bodywork
on the car and ask them how the car looked when they first got
it in, and how long it took them to get things looking the way
it does today.
Finally as a last resort try finding out what you can about
the current owner/seller. What you can establish about their
integrity is a very important part of the "success formula".
Start of by interviewing them about the car, ask how long
they�ve owned it for, what repairs they have had to make to the
car during their ownership, and if they were going to keep the
car what is the next repair they would want to take care of. All
the time covertly try to find out things like what they do for a
living, want kind of house/neighborhood they live in (look in
the background of the photos they may have sent you of the car)
are you looking at a nice house with a well kept yard, or a
front yard that's indecipherable from a wrecking yard! Is this
the kind of person, who takes care of problems quickly and
correctly when they arise, or someone who procrastinates and
bodges things out of desperation? This is a good indication of
how they likely maintained their car.
Of course no matter what you do when buying a car long
distance, there is always some risk involved. The objective in
finding a cars "story" is to try to minimize that risk as much
as possible. This is something that can be achieved if you do
your homework and use �due diligence� before writing that check!
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