I'm about to go out to look at a couple of 997.1 Coupes, both "S," one 4S, that are listed in an area I can drive to (as opposed to 99%, which are located where I'd need to fly to :-) )

I have been looking at listings here in the vehicle classifieds, on Autotrader, Craigslist, ebay, and at dealers so I have some idea of what the market is. I have also played around with the Edmunds, NADA, and KBB pricing engines and will print those out when I go to look at the cars. When it comes to 997.1s, I've basically eliminated for now the cars that have a high enough risk of IMS problems that I'd feel obligated to rectify that post haste, so, for the moment, I've only looked at 2006, 2007, and 2008 models. Of course, all things being equal, I'd take a 997.2 if it dropped into my lap, but none have.

The cars I am going to look at shortly are not typical "Rennlist" forum member's cars in that they don't appear to have the detailed service records and probably not other evidence of a fastidious owner, other than keeping them looking nice. There may even be significant deferred maintenance. One of the cars has already been PPI'd and the shop that did that told me that it needed $3-$4K in work to be brought back to great condition; the service manager (it was an independent shop) said that the car was basically, overall, a good car, but had work to do on it.

If I buy one of these cars it will go to the local Porsche dealer for a PPI first; that has already been scheduled. I have proposed to one seller that we would meet at the dealer after the PPI is done to both get the report together from the service people.

Having bought a number of used BMWs in the past, I am not foolish enough to expect to buy a used car that needs nothing done to it to bring it up to my own standards (high). At the same time, it is just a car, and it is not going into a museum :-) Perfection is not something easily attained on this planet.

So, back to my questions: let's say I use the pricing engines and I apply the "Very Good" or "Good" standard of condition to the car, factoring in options and configuration. Prior to inspection we agreed on a price of $XXXX.XX, pending the PPI. If the PPI says the car needs $1000 of work, but the PPI comes back saying it needs $4,000, for example, what should I try to negotiate with the seller? How much should I try to get him to pay in the sense of reducing the price? Obviously, if the PPI shows that the car is a piece of junk and needs $10K worth of work, I'm not going to buy it.

The cars I am looking at have around 60,000 miles on them, one is a 2008 and the other is a 2006. I'm assuming that this is not a cause for concern, but rather might very well effect the price vs. a car with the lower mileages one commonly sees, for example, less than 45K.

One more thing is that one of the cars was in an accident in 2009 (a long time ago). The Carfax says the car was rear-ended and needed to be towed, with no further information. The seller says that he researched this and it is not accurate, that the bumper cover sustained minor damage and no tow was involved. Of course, how could I find this out after all these years? I'd think it is unknowable. Let's assume there is no frame damage or other significant evidence on inspection of an old accident. How much of a deduct from the valuation should come from this sort of thing being on the car's Carfax record? Normally, I don't even look at cars that have reported accidents in their history, but then, I almost never get a chance to look at cars that located not far from where I live, so at least with this one I can go look at it in person and have it inspected, for not very much money or effort.

Any other thoughts on this process that could be useful to me?

Thanks in advance!

 

I think you're looking to apply a technical formula to something that is fluid--a negotiation. First off, I would not be scared off my mileage at all, unless you plan on buying this car as a collector item or investment. If you're looking to buy a driver, mileage is just a number. What is far, far more important is detailed maintenance history. If you find a car with 60K miles and a conscientious owner that did all the scheduled maintenance on time and has the records to prove it, that is a car you ought to buy with confidence. For that reason, I'd probably pass on trying to get a deal by purchasing a car with scant or no records that essentially needs to be rehabbed to get back to good condition. I would not hesitate to find the right car off of Rennlist where you may have to either fly to the location, or do a video walk-around instead of driving the car yourself.

But, if you are restricting yourself to cars that are within relatively close distance to where you are located, yes, I'd definitely negotiate the price of the repairs into the purchase. If you do a PPI and it reveals $4K worth of work that needs to be done, I think it is fully well within a fair negotiation to ask the seller to either do the work or knock the price of the work off the asking price. The worst they can say is no, which may give you a good reason to pass on the car. Like any car, these cars will treat you right for many miles and years as long as you treat them right. If you find one that has been neglected, you may be buying someone else's problem. I'd strongly suggest you buy a car with detailed records.

 

I very much appreciate your comments and we are very largely on the same page. I do have a little bit of a different perspective from my own experience, which I will lay out.

My experience with German cars is with BMWs (not uncommon here, I suspect). Once a classic or semi-collectible car gets to be ~10 years old, especially after 15 years, you tend to end up with one of two situations. One would be a car that has had only a single owner, or perhaps 2, who have kept binders of every receipt from every service on the car. The other scenario is a car with multiple owners, usually with limited records available. My 2000 Z3M Coupe (Clownshoe), of which I am the 2nd owner, was bought about 2 years ago with around 57K miles on it. I received a binder 4" thick full of receipts on the car when I bought it. I have purchased 2 other cars from about the same year (a '99 and an '01) which were Z3 Coupes, not "M's."

The '01 was sold as a pristine perfect car that the first owner had Zymoled every week and always kept garaged, without a spec of rust even though it came from the NE US. The seller was a participant in online forums. The 2nd owner had owned the car for 1.5 years, continuing this "perfect care." The '99 had 7 or 8 owners, none for more than a year and a half during the last 5 or 6 of those with no records other than an oil change from the seller.

Which was the best car when I received it? You probably know where I am going on this :-) Of the 3, only the single owner Z3M Coupe was PPI'd, as I flew out to buy it in Portland Oregon and drove it back to Idaho. Not getting a PPI is stupid, I have learned that from experience, now.

The '01, reputed to have been treated with the utmost care, was a pile of rust that I got swindled on, resulting in a lawsuit and a large loss on my part. The Z3M Coupe, single owner, PPI'd, has cost me around $5K in the 2 years I have owned it, in spite of a near perfect PPI at a BMW dealer prior to purchase. The car is now in great shape, but the truth of the matter is that the former owner got complacent and deferred lots of stuff including a new clutch, shift pins, A/C service, and a front and back windshield washer system that leaked everywhere and needed total replacement.

The best car was the '01 with multiple owners, which I resold a year and a half ago after putting $1K into it myself. It turned out that all of these short term owners fixed whatever was wrong with the car when they owned it, and it was almost a turnkey car purchase (central locking system needed replacement, which is what I did as the 8th owner).

The bottom line, I think, is that records are great to have, but they are no proof of the condition of the car, and neither they nor a PPI, even at a good dealer, is any guarantee of anything.

Going out of state to buy that perfect vehicle from the perfect owner, Rennlist member or not, is no guarantee of success, either. Once you have made the commitment to go get on a plane and buy a car, cognitive dissonance is going to kick in and it is going to be very hard to change your mind and not return with the car; you have already sold yourself on it, after all, that is why you bought the plane ticket and paid for the PPI. Plus, people like to present themselves as fastidious owners, and I'm 99.9% sure that there is a range to that, even on this board, no matter how people represent themselves on the internet . . . .

I would appreciate any other comments that other people might have, also, thanks very much, this is a great group!

 

Regarding price negotiation:

If you and the seller already negotiated a price point reflecting any issues/damages that need to be corrected, i don't think it's fair for you to ask for another reduction after the PPI tells you things that the seller already informed you of.

Now, if the PPI comes back with concerns that wasn't discussed prior, that's when you can start factoring negotiations. For example, if the PPI tells you the car needs 10 things fixed in order to get the car to your "high" standards, but the seller already informed you about 8 of those things prior to you agreeing on a price, then you should negotiate the value of the other 2 things that weren't discussed.

Good luck

 

Asking for a reduction based on the results of a PPI is the wise thing to do. How much reduction is entirely out of the buyers control. Wherever the two shall meet is the selling price....

Bought a 2006 base 997 (with a few nice options) back in Oct. Decided how much I was willing to spend and what condition/mileage car I was looking for. In my case I budgeted high mileage sub $30K .1 base cars knowing full well I was looking to do a complete engine rebuild at some point down the line. Another caveat was no dealer cars. Not interested in paying the extra $5-10K for dealer markup. I became a Craigslist junkie as in daily views of the 5 major cities within a certain radius. This went on for 3-4 months. A few cars popped up in that time that came close but each time I found enough reason in my phone conversations to back out. Finally landed one 5 hours drive from home. PCA member out of Portland with great service history and $5K in receipts in the past 12 months. Big ticket items were a new clutch/flywheel/RMS and new Pioneer Apple car play head unit. The head unit was exactly what I would have installed day 1. The PPI came up great overall w/ $1K in needed repairs. Coolant res, rear brakes etc... I offered a price $3K below asking price and we settled on $2K under. I've easily spent an additional $4K over the winter on new coil overs/wheels & tires/ engine mounts/... Not all necessary but I plan to keep the car indefinitely.

This particular car had by far the cleanest interior of any I had looked at regardless of mileage. Zero respray on the bumpers and no accidents. Just an honest "PCA member owned" albeit high mileage .1 car purchased well below current market. Couldn't be happier.

 

Anything related to failing an inspection (tires below wear limit, CEL or dash errors logged, chip in the windshield, non-functioning light or bulb, etc) along with anything that's broken like an inner wheel liner, cracked lip spoiler, etc should 100% be the seller's responsibility to correct.

You might be able to also make a case for them paying for most of a deferred schedule service, and depending on the mileage - i.e. if the mileage is at 61k but it never had it's 60k mile service, the cost of this could certainly be a shared expense. Anything else is purely a negotiation.

For me though, the Full Leather option is a must have where the dashboard and doors are leather - you may not care as much, but I think it makes the cabin that much more special and an enjoyable place to spend time.

 

FWIW, just keep in mind that high mileage will be a $ factor down the road regardless of how well maintained the car is. For example, if you buy an early 997.1 with mileage at 25-30k in the low-mid $30's and only put on say 25k miles over the next five years, you most likely will still be able to sell it in the mid to high 20's. It appears that well maintained relatively low milage 911's of any year seem to plateau around the mid $20s mark. OTOH, if you buy high mileage, regardless of how well maintained, and assuming that car will be at or over 100k miles in a few years, you may have a tougher time selling at the price you want and it will cost you more on the backend in that respect. It seems that people purport to dismiss high mileage if a car has been meticulously maintained, but, it is a factor at least IMHO from an overall cost benefit perspective.

 

Thanks for your comments, which are important and in line with my own thoughts. I think this is more and more important if one is going to use the car as a DD or otherwise rack up the miles. I would be lucky to put 3000 miles a year on whatever I buy, given that I have a whole bunch of other desirable performance cars :-)

I think that the mileage is more important the more expensive the car you are looking at. For a car at 30-$40K, I'm more concerned with whether I can unload the car rather than a loss of an extra few thousand at the time of resale.

All things being equal, I would much prefer a lower mileage car than the 2 cars I am going to look at soon, both having around 60K miles on them.

Thanks!

 

Only thing I'll add is that if the PPI turns up $4,000 worth of items that can be fixed, that's not necessarily the seller's problem.

A PPI should turn up every possible issue the car might have, but not everything that is unearthed needs to be fixed, and not everything that needs to be fixed has to be fixed at his estimated price.

I've bought cars that had estimates on them for deferred maintenance and other items that totaled a few thousand Dollars. While I was able to negotiate the price down for some of those items, I could not get the seller to drop the price to cover them all--and I was fine with that. I knew I could do a lot of the work myself for a fraction of the estimated price and I was still coming out ahead and I also knew that some of the things on the list weren't an issue for me at all.

Happy hunting.

 

Thanks for your comments.

I think it depends, and likely it is what I will run into with these cars I'm going to look at. There is maintenance that is supposed to be done on a schedule, and many high end car owners are even more fastidious. In the case of a multi-owner car, if the seller can't tell you whether or not this or that scheduled maintenance was done, and the Carfax is similarly uninformative, and the PPI comes up saying that certain major services need to be done, that's an issue. Granted, if the comparison is a Kelly Blue Book price at average or poor condition, that's one thing, but if the seller is selling his car as if it is "very good" or "excellent," there's some real deductions that need doing or the seller needs to find another buyer.

 

There are many options for sports cars, a 911 is not for everyone, as simple as that.

 

I agree. I think you can often tell how good an owner was by what they had done to a car. I have even trusted sellers who didn't do a certain maintenance because it was clear from talking to them that they knew what they were doing and had a valid reason for not doing something at a particular time or interval.

A long discussion with a seller is always a good idea. And when I say discussion, I mean let them do as much talking as you can get them to do. I have also had sellers divulge very important information by accident because they got too comfortable with me while I was looking at their car.

Keep us updated on your search. I remember when I was in your position. I've had my car for almost 5 years but this is my first P-car, so I was nervous.

 

997.1's are trading hands at a rapid pace. Look at how many threads are on here about people looking for their first Porsche (like you) or about just getting their first Porsche. I'm also on the 997 Enthusiasts group on Facebook and the posts of people showing off their new toy is second only to people putting ugly cosmetic accessories on their cars (seriously, it's like watching a group of grown men play Dress Me Up Barbie with their cars.)

A well strategized negotiation approach is good as long as you realize that every transaction is a fluid process. Strict rigidity to the plan is not necessarily going to help. The economy is good and there are likely a few more people behind you on every car that are hitting middle age and want to get themselves the toy they've dreamed of since childhood.

If buying from a private party I always buy the person as much as the thing he/she is selling. I like buying from people who aren't afraid to do basic work on the car or at least wants to understand what has broken on the car and the process for fixing it. I avoid cars owned by people who bring cars to the dealer and just say 'do whatever needs to be done'.

Lastly, get the full leather interior and adaptive sport seats.

 

I agree with you on this. I am the same way. But honestly, there are very few people that think this way. I think the OP is not going to be very fond of a DIY owned car. Service records are a must for some buyers. I myself will probably have a hard time selling when the time comes being that an oil change and other maintenance for a 997 is super easy and i refuse to go to the dealer for it. I guess i should start collecting old oil filters and brake pads for proof.

 

This is terrific advice and I do appreciate it. I almost never get a chance to look at a car locally, because people drive trucks and minivans and SUVs where I live, not sporty passenger cars. So even though I like sports cars, the purchases have all been done at long distance, with lots of emails, phone calls, etc., before ever going out to see the car.

In this case I really should keep my mouth shut as much as possible, just pose questions and see where it goes.

Thanks!