Spams and scams which stop my flipping fortune
AS it’s my job to keep a close eye on the Land Rover market, I’m always amused when I see a car selling for £5000 at an auction on a Saturday and then advertised for £10,000 on the Monday. It’s usually listed by a dealer who hasn’t even collected it from the sale yet and will feature the same pictures and description used by the auction house.
Presuming the dealers actually sell at these prices, there is clearly real money to be made by spotting bargains and then flipping them. I don’t begrudge these traders their earnings either, as the profit is usually made by using their years of experience to source cars, prepare and then market them properly.
For example, I spotted a 2000 Freelander which had no MOT and hadn’t moved for three years sell at an auction for £320. That’s cheap enough anyway, but it was part of a probate sale being sold alongside the deceased’s furniture. It was the only car under the hammer that day, looked sad out in the car park on its own, and most of the buyers were there for grandfather clocks and sideboards.
Clean up that Freelander, get it an MOT and the 50,000-mile car would sell easily on a forecourt or online sales site for £2500. All it takes is a little knowledge and graft to turn a decent profit.
But there’s a reason I haven’t used the knowledge I’ve gained by studiously looking at adverts for Land Rovers all day to make a fortune flipping cars. I am writing this from a poky room which smells of damp rather than supping cocktails on my yacht, because I love buying cars but can’t bear selling them.
I don’t mean that I have hoarding instincts, but rather that I find the whole process very stressful. Placing an advert for a car on a public forum seems to be like spinning a roulette wheel where the only prize is some form of random grief and wasted time.
Within minutes of placing an advert there are inevitably messages using an odd combination of letters and numbers offering half the asking price and saying they can be at my door within minutes with a wedge of cash. By the time I do get a genuine enquiry, my heckles are up so far that I’m rude enough to scare them off.
But while the ‘WOTZ UR BEST PRCE M8’ traders are irritating enough, it’s the scammers and cloners which are really ruining the whole buying and selling game for us all. If you are a vendor, you are naturally suspicious of anyone asking for a registration number, VIN or photo of the V5. And rightly so. But it does make it tricky for an honest buyer to do the necessary checks before viewing a car.
If you are a seller, you must be even more careful at every stage of the process. Reader Grahame Tobin was contacted by a man calling himself Robert about a Discovery he had for sale. Robert said he would pay full asking price for the car, but since he was in France, it would have to be collected by his shipping agent. Grahame smelled a rat but went along with it, supplying details of a bank account as requested and awaited the transfer of a deposit. He didn’t hold his breath.
The so-called buyer then changed his tune, Grahame explains. “I had an email from him overnight now saying he can only pay by cheque, which I am taking as a ruse so he has both my bank account details and also my address to make it easier to steal my identity.”
Grahame then stopped bothering with the fake Frenchman, but other sellers might not be so lucky. There are other variations of the scam where the buyer does wire the money over, then says the exchange rate calculation means they have overpaid and asks for a partial refund by bank transfer. Once they have it, the original wire is reversed, and you are left out of pocket.
Then there are the buyers who turn up at your house and go through the whole process of checking the car and agreeing a price. They do the paperwork and let you see their banking app, showing the funds have been transferred. The amount doesn’t arrive in your account but, under pressure, you trust them and let them take the car. Only too late do you realise the app was a clever fake – and your loss won’t be covered by insurance.
The other nasty nobble is to have two or more people looking at the car. While one distracts you, the other slips some oil in the coolant or pulls a lead to produce an expensive-looking fault. They then try to knock a grand or so off the price.
The only answer for me, it seems, is to buy a house with a barn so I can buy and store more Land Rovers without ever having to sell them. I can’t afford that yet, but I’m sure it won’t be too long before I’m offered millions of dollars to help an exotic princess manage her inheritance.
BACK in 1985 I was still at school but already planning the specification of the Land Rover that I would own once I had passed my driving test. It has to be said that my ambitions were modest: I wanted a Series III short wheelbase in Marine Blue, ideally with a BMC 2.5 diesel engine (a local gamekeeper had one and assured me it was much better than the Land Rover diesel), with a truck cab and three-quarter canvas. In other words, the sort of Land Rover that seemed more common than the Ford Cortina in mid-’80s rural Lincolnshire.
But that was only the starting point. As we all know, old Land Rovers can be endlessly customised and accessorised, and there were plenty of tempting goodies on offer to make my (imaginary) Land Rover really stand out from the crowd. The Internet has been part of our lives for so long now that it is easy to forget just how much effort was required to find out who was selling what: you bought a copy of a Land Rover magazine, then wrote to all the advertisers whose products you liked the look of, sometimes enclosing a stamped addressed envelope. A few days later the postman would bring you a pile of brochures and catalogues, and one of my favourites was from a Welsh company called Bearmach.
I think I managed to put together the specification for my dream Land Rover almost entirely from the Bearmach accessory catalogue. White eight-spoke steel wheels, KC Daylighter spotlights, bull bar, winch, mesh light guards and much more. About ten years later I actually bought a late Series IIA to almost exactly the specification that I had daydreamed about when I was supposed to be paying attention in class, but by that time my tastes had moved on to V8s and big Perkins diesels, so I didn’t keep the little IIA for long.
When I started working on Land Rovers for a living in the early 2000s, I needed a source of parts at reasonable prices. For a while I survived on a trade account with one of the larger local independents, but as the business grew I decided to see whether any of the big wholesalers would be prepared to deal with me, and I ended up with Bearmach. I was very happy with this: the quality was generally good, and the coverage of parts for the older vehicles was so comprehensive that I seldom had to buy from anyone else.
The Covid pandemic caused absolute havoc with supply chains. Many of the parts we depend on come from China, India or Turkey: with both manufacturing and shipping badly disrupted, I was not at all surprised that gaps started appearing in Bearmach’s range. I got used to hunting around for alternative sources, but Bearmach remained my supplier of choice.
One Monday I had a largeish order to put through. I had just stripped three ex-military Series engines for rebuilding and needed pistons in various sizes. To my absolute delight Bearmach had good quality AE pistons in stock at a very reasonable price, although only in one size. I ordered two sets, and wondered how many more they had in stock. I placed the order via the online trade portal, received the usual acknowledgement and shipping notification. Nothing seemed amiss.
Back at home that evening I was idly browsing through Facebook and saw a post from a well-known classic Land Rover specialist, lamenting the demise of… Bearmach. You what? I checked on their website and sure enough the whole thing had vanished, replaced by a short, bleak message: ‘Bearmach is unable to fulfil your order today’. Sadly, it appears at the time of writing that Bearmach will be unable to fulfil my order tomorrow, or on any other day. That is a great shame, not least for all the people who worked there. Whenever I had a question or problem it was always dealt with politely and efficiently. The quality of the stuff Bearmach sold remained top-notch to the end, and if any ex-employees are reading this, I would like to thank you for all your hard work and wish you well for the future.
For a small independent specialist like the Norfolk Garage, losing one’s main supplier without warning is less than ideal. As soon as I had established that Bearmach’s disappearance was more than a short-term glitch, I put out feelers to various suppliers to see whether I could quickly fill the gap before I started running out of parts. I am pleased to say that Allmakes responded quickly and positively. Back when I was running the business from a dilapidated dirt-floored barn, most of my parts came from the local Allmakes stockist and I cannot recall ever having any complaints about the quality. The range is very comprehensive, with a choice of manufacturers for most of the parts I regularly buy.
Even before my parts supply was thrown into turmoil, September was looking like being a hard month to get through. Not through shortage of work, quite the opposite. For the last couple of years my turnover has been nudging dangerously close to the threshold above which I have to start charging VAT. The threshold has not been increased since 2017, and with inflation this year forecast to exceed 10 per cent it is hard to see how I can avoid the Revenue’s net.
This is supposed to be a column about Land Rovers, not tax, so suffice it to say that to comply with the VAT reporting regime I am having to put in an entirely new accounting system. To be honest I should have done this years ago. I have been running everything with spreadsheets which is a horribly inefficient way of doing business in 2022. Fortunately, a very long time ago I served a four-year sentence as a trainee with a large firm of chartered accountants. Although I spent far too much time messing around with old Land Rovers instead of swotting up for my accountancy exams (which I duly failed and had to resit) the basic principles of accountancy and book-keeping have stayed with me. I did most of the new system setup while watching television on a Saturday evening.
By the time I have finished sorting out the financial stuff, my new website should be ready – more change, more demands on my non-workshop time (otherwise known as weekends). I put the old website together in around 2003 and it shows: since I know next to nothing about web design, I used a piece of design software which predates tablets and smartphones by many years, and which will not run on anything newer than Windows XP.
Fortunately a Defender-owning web designer came to my rescue – he is migrating my existing website content onto a new platform while I rebuild an engine for him. A Td5 engine no less, the first one I have had to bits. The problem I will still have once the migration is complete is that much of the website content is rather out of date. I believe there is something in there about being able to pick up a roadworthy Series III for £1500. Those were the days. So I will have to go through the entire website page by page and rewrite some of the sections that have been overtaken by modern life. I am reluctant to bin too much of the content altogether, as people still keep emailing me to tell me how useful they find the information. I suspect I will still be updating web pages at Christmas.