You hear a lot about the crazy car market for the past few months. I don’t think many guessed there would be so much fire during a global Pandemic, yet here we are. Two months ago we decided to see about getting out of our 2018 Jeep Cherokee lease six months early. The main reason being we wanted a new 2020 with the tow package for activities like biking. We didn’t want to invest that in an SUV that would be turned-in relatively soon. Plus the updated infotainment with CarPlay was a nice bonus.
So enter the new Cherokee. A Slate Blue Cherokee Limited just arrived on my lot which is the configuration we wanted. Being that I work for a Jeep dealer, I had our Sales Manager look at the values and we could get out of the 2018 for the dealer payoff amount. It was around $19,500 at the time. Being that we were already sitting on multiple similar used Cherokees and that was 95% of the market, he didn’t want to go any higher. Fair enough. We were okay with this, but after reading so much about Carvana going high on value, I decided to give it a shot.
The Carvana offer was $21.1. Okay, now we’re talking! I’ll take that extra equity and my dealer could care less if I sell to them. Out of curiosity though, I decided to check out the Carvana competitor, Vroom. Their offer? $22.5!! Woah, three thousand dollars of positive equity on a lease? That’s insane. So done, accepted Vrooms offer and waiterd for the next steps.
And wait. You may have heard of Carvana’s streamlined and easy process when selling a car. Well, Vroom left something to desired. To keep it short, I’ll just say it took about three weeks before they had a carrier pick up the old Jeep. In between this time, it took multiple phone calls (with nice people at least) to figure out when paperwork would arrive and set up shipping. Some phone calls weren’t returned. It was a bit of an annoyance but with their strong offer, I didn’t care a huge amount. However, I could see how it would be a bit intimidating for someone outside the industry just trying to sell their car. My advice would be to go with Carvana unless the offer is substantially better.
Currently, the old Jeep is for sale for $23,760, just $1200 higher than what they paid for it. And this is after they shipped it from Pennsylvania to Texas and I’d assume run through their shop. Yeah, good luck with that profit lol. (Note - it was $24.5 two weeks ago, I just got lazy and never wrote about it).
So, that’s my story on getting a $3k equity check on a leased vehicle. It all worked out in the end and we’re happy with the new Jeep. We love the new blue color plus this one has the 2.0 Turbo and Panoramic roof which has been lovely when the weather is kind. Link of old Jeep below (if kinja doesn’t kinja)
https://www.vroom.com/inventory/jeep-cherokee-2018-1C4PJMDX6JD601918