Oh yeah, FJ market is crazy. @RevolverRob Who'da thought they beat the stock market.
For real. Had my FJ in for service at the local Firestone last week. A used car dealer on the lot next door tried to buy it from me.
'07, 178k, not perfect cosmetics. Dealer said he'd do 12k cash, was dead serious. I told him no, but asked him what he'd list it for, "16k and it wouldn't sit on my lot for longer than a weekend."
Admittedly this was a Buy-Here Pay-Here place, but still, 16k for a 14-year old truck with nearly 200k miles. It is well maintained though and that obviously helps.
I just checked my dealer's website. Here's the NEW car list:
I would say during a normal year, they would have north of 500 4R, and 250 Tacoma. A couple years ago, when another PF'er in FL couldn't find a 4R in his county, I took a video of the dealer lot down the block from my office and he was shocked
I wuz tempted. I thought about a straight across trade for that 2014 FJ. My 2019 4R only has 9500 miles on it. I didn't think they would bite and I didn't have 3 hours to dicker. Buying anything from a dealer is like laying siege to a castle. You need a lot of time and a catapult with flaming projectiles.
In the P-F basket of deplorables.
I have this way of accumulating vehicles. Not junk ones, but not real great ones, either. It's a curse because I have such a hard time paying good money for one when I used to make a living fixing them. So my thought patterns go along with most mechanics I know (they tried to call us technicians, but we resisted).....our dealership employee parking lot was full of some of the rattiest still-running vehicles in the town -- it was sometimes a source of pride for whose was closest to death's door yet still being limped along at the least possible cost to it's owner. But I digress.
So I decided to sell some stuff. This was like 3 weeks ago. Sold my 95 Corvette back to it's original owner for the same amount I paid for it 3 years ago. Sold my Outback with still-leaking head gaskets for $1700, or about $1000 more than it should've been worth in my mind. Sold a friend's wrecked and poorly repaired '10 Jetta which has been the bane of my existence for $3500, and that car shouldn't have fetched $2k with it's tacky paint job and screwed up right front corner. Sold my little commuter Ninja 250 for $1500 which is what it was worth, and sold an old GS425E in non-inspected condition and needing work for $1000, probably $500 more than it'd have sold for last year.
In no case did any of the vehicles I advertised stay up for more than 3 days.
Doing good selling guns too! It's a good time to be a seller; make hay while the sun shines, y'all.