Quentin Willson

How to avoid the flipping outrageous practice of sellers who bag a bargain then advertise the exact same car within days – and with a huge mark-up

There’s some outrageous flipping going on. You ‘flip’ by buying a car from an auction, trade or private seller and then advertising it for more within a few weeks or even days later. This is, of course, what the trade has been doing for years and they’re very good at spotting an opportunity. But since the boom days of 2014 we’ve seen a lot of amateur classic car home traders and pop-up dealers doing some very brazen flipping, and it’s clouding the market. Nobody minds when there’s value being added by cosmetic or mechanical refreshing and improvements or having some sort of warranty thrown into the deal. But when it’s just profittaking without so much of an oil change we enthusiasts tend to get a bit huffy.

This month I watched a nice ’64½ Mustang sell for £23,300 at auction only to spot the same car online a few weeks later for £33,000. Call me traditional but £9700 profit in less than a month by just flipping seems immoral. And if you think that’s an unreasonable margin, what about the very low-mileage Corniche convertible knocked down for £90k and then advertised a month later for £130k? It was exactly the same car but with a massively inflated price tag. And when the profit margin is 100% – like the BMW 635i I watched bought at auction for £13k and then saw advertised later for £26k – you really start to see red.

And yes, I know life is all about seizing opportunities and everybody’s entitled to a living, but the growing trend of all sorts of people flipping classic cars isn’t helping market stability or integrity. Opportunists are pumping prices and having buyers over. Buy that Mustang, Corniche or BMW at their flipped-up prices and you’ll likely lose money – and nobody wants that.

Your best defence against buying something that’s been freshly flipped is to put the registration number into Google, hit images, and see if the car was recently pictured in an auction catalogue. You may be surprised. Armed with your new information you can either turn on your heel and not bother or give the seller a hard time by telling them you know exactly how much they’ve just bought the car for. Personally, I’d walk away in a sulk.

You can also avoid the flippers’ clutches by only buying from established dealers, auctions or long-term private owners. With so much information on the web, spotting the flipped cars and tracing the recent auction or dealer selling history isn’t that hard. But be suspicious of adverts with number plates covered – the seller might not want you to spot that his car was sold a month earlier at auction for 20 grand less than he now wants you to fork out.

How much the phenomenon of flipping has distorted the market we can never be sure but given that most people value their classics against adverts of similar cars they’ve seen on the web rather than actual transaction prices, the effect could be profound. The moral is caveat emptor, so do your research and only buy from sellers you feel you can trust. That’s why those words ‘long term ownership’ have become so important in the market. Asking the seller how long they’ve owned that classic is the killer question guaranteed to catch out the flipper. Make sure you ask it.

Quentin Willson had a nine-year stint presenting the BBC’S Top Gear, has bought and sold countless cars and has cemented a reputation as everyone’s favourite motoring pundit.