9 steps to get the most out of your sale | How to sell a car: Part 3
By Tim Suddard
Jul 21, 2025
Back in the day, it was relatively easy to sell a car: You placed an ad and waited for the phone to ring. Today the process is a lot more complicated, especially if you’re trying to cast the widest possible net to get the highest possible sale price.
Fortunately we have some experience in this area, so when this 1965 Sunbeam Tiger fell into our lap, we saw an opportunity–actually, several of them.
This was a dirty car filled with garbage and packed into a cramped, dark garage. It looked so unappealing that we knew we could buy it on the cheap, and we did. First opportunity realized.
Next we wanted to clean it up and get it running for a quick sale. That proved relatively cheap and easy.
Now we were ready to attain our final goal: selling our Tiger for a profit. A couple of bucks and a bit of time translated into a nice little monetary gain while putting a cool classic back in circulation. Here’s how we did it.
1. Take Good Photos
As we detailed last issue, after spending a weekend turning our barn find into a presentable car that actually ran, we were ready to start the sales process. What that means in today’s world is some proper photography. This is an absolute necessity, whether you’re selling on your local Craigslist or nationally on an online auction site like Bring a Trailer or eBay Motors.
Why so much emphasis on taking photos? Easy:
Pictures sell cars. According to our friends at eBay Motors, listings with 40 or more photos are 70 percent more likely to sell. You don’t need to be an Ansel Adams, but if you follow these few simple steps, you’ll be much more likely to end up with photos that will get that vehicle sold.
- Location, Location, Location: A clean, simple background always beats out a cluttered one. Easy backgrounds include brick walls, closed garage doors and wide-open parking lots. A garage full of junk is not the right answer.
- Clean It Up: Take a few minutes to remove any trash, reattach any loose items, and present the car in a professional way.
- Light Matters: Avoid dark garages, harsh midday sun and distracting shadows. Try to shoot the car outdoors on an overcast day or in the soft light of early evenings and mornings. If the sun is out, place it at your back–but watch out where your own shadow falls. A flash or shop light can help chase away shadows.
2. Shoot Away
Film is cheap–just kidding, we know you’re shooting digital–so go nuts and take a lot of photos. How many? A lot. Aim for 100 and don’t be bashful about taking too many. You want to show potential buyers everything about the car so they’re confident that it’s the right fit for them. So shoot generously.
Equipment-wise, a decent digital camera or even your phone set to its highest/finest setting should be fine. If the photos look fuzzy, dark or just horrible, stop what you’re doing and figure out why.
3. Know Your Car
The more you know about the car, the more confidence you can instill in your shoppers. Look at it from their point of view: Would you rather buy a car that is simply said to run great, or one that comes with a dyno-verified horsepower figure that nearly matches the factory spec? What if that’s accompanied by a video showing a humming engine, smooth gearbox and smoke-free exhaust?
Take the time to learn about the car that you are selling, or pay an expert to teach you. Extra testing and analysis–stuff like a dyno graph, used oil analysis or a report from a trusted third party–costs money, but can make for a more appetizing vehicle.
4. Get Your Paperwork Straight
We constantly see cars for sale with dodgy paperwork. While we don’t think these cars are stolen, it’s obvious someone is being lazy, disorganized or just cheap.
Open titles are one of the most common paperwork fails. A title is “open” when the current owner never titles the car in his or her name, instead using the title from the previous owner (who signed the title as “seller” without getting the required buyer’s signature on it). This saves registration fees and sales tax, but it’s not kosher. When you see “selling for a friend” on an eBay listing, what you are usually dealing with is an open title. What you probably aren’t dealing with is the legal owner. Having the proper title in the seller’s name certainly keeps things honest, straight and legal. So make sure you have the correct title to the car you’re selling.
5. Research Values
It’s hard to sell something if you don’t know what it’s worth. In today’s world, that information is usually easily available.
The guy who sold us our Tiger said that he didn’t use the internet, yet he “felt” that it was worth roughly $10,000. While that would have been true about 10 years ago for a Tiger in this condition, our seller had done no recent research to check his facts. This was a costly mistake.
Once we hopped online and looked at
Hagerty’s online value guide–available free to anyone, not just Hagerty customers–we learned that a No. 4 condition Tiger is worth about $55,000. A No. 4 car runs and drives, but has visible scars. Our Tiger was obviously a few notches below that, but there was still a lot of room between that value and what the seller thought it was worth.
Past auction results, which are also available online, can provide useful data as well. Classic car values are dictated largely by rarity and condition, however, and you’ll also need to understand the harsh reality that an amateur restoration is not the same as the ones you’ll see fetching top dollar at auction.
If you don’t know the difference, get off the couch and go to a top auction or concours event and study what the best cars really look like. Then you can set your expectations accordingly. And if all else fails, you can contact marque experts. Yes, again, this research takes time.