Originally Posted by kane

In a round about way I do. Many years ago I worked for a company that did car valuations on total loss cars for insurance companies. To do this they had a huge database with classified ads for cars from all the areas they worked in. The analyst would call these ads and find out info on the car even when it sold and they used this info to put a market value on the customer's car.

The classified reports would show ads as old as 180 days. Most people never called on those old ads, but a friend of mine that worked there and I found out that in some cases those cars were still for sale and they would let them go cheap. The first car we bought was a VW Rabbit. We got it for $400. We put about $200 into it doing a tune up and cleaning it up and we sold it a week later for $1300. Within a couple of months we were buying at least one car per week. We worked only in older, cheaper cars. We would buy them tune them up and fix them up a little and flip them for fast cash.

Eventually we got a car we couldn't move quickly so we had to register it. It was then that we found out if you sold more than a certain number of cars per year in this state you had to register to become a dealer (this was in the 1990's so things may be different now). We didn't want to do that. I ended up leaving the job to write full time for a music magazine and he moved out of state so it came to an end, but over several months we probably bought and sold 30-35 cars. Since then I have done this on my own probably 10 more times.

So I don't know much about running the actual retail business, but I did learn a lot about how to write good ads, how and where to buy cars and good sales techniques. If I can help you out at all just let me know.