Should I buy from car brokers?

Most people feel uncomfortable haggling to get money off their new cars, and if you do haggle it’s hard to know if you’re getting a good price, so the attraction of buying a new car at an upfront discounted price is hard to pass on.

That’s one of the reasons some people turn to car brokers; to get someone who has connections with dealerships to get the car you want at a price that you probably wouldn’t be able to get negotiating by yourself.

That all sounds good, right? If that’s all there was then it would be – and everyone would buy their car that way.

Before you go down the route of using a broker to get yourself a new car, there are a few things you need to consider first.

False prices

We’ve seen countless examples of broker prices which are misleading or often outright false. Many brokers try to compete with each other on price and price alone, so they put up false prices just to encourage you to ring them up.

Finance-dependent prices

Many brokers will advertise a price that’s reliant on you taking finance, though you wouldn’t know that from reading their websites. Often they will only be able to offer the price if you take third-party finance at huge interest rates (often above 11%), which would make the car far more expensive.

Long delivery times

Most brokers only work with one dealer per make of car they sell, for example only one Audi dealer, one Ford dealer and so on. As a result they end up putting all their orders through to one dealer, meaning that dealer has a lot of cars being ordered from the factory, so his waiting times will be much longer than other dealers. So you could end up waiting for months instead of weeks for your new car!

No transparency

With a broker you have no idea who you are buying from. They won’t tell you the dealer’s name, or where they are, so you can’t ask the dealer questions, test-drive with them or go to visit them at all.

There often isn’t a contract with you and the dealer, because it’s with the broker. This is something we strongly recommend you don’t accept, because it can cause issues if you want to return the car or if the broker goes bust.

Hidden costs

The majority of brokers have hidden costs. We often see them not including 12 months of road tax, not including delivery, VAT, number plates and so on – small ways to save money for them.

They don’t value the dealer’s customer service

A broker doesn’t care what the service is like that the supplying dealer provides you, it’s only the price that matters. So you won’t know if the dealer is really friendly, can help you make an informed purchase and can keep you up-to-date throughout the order process.

What’s the alternative?

We started carwow because we believe that car buying should be better.

On carwow you can build the new cars you’re considering, then compare offers directly from dealers. You always see exactly who the dealer is, where they are, and there are absolutely no extra costs.

You can contact the dealer at anytime, see reviews from past buyers and if you want to buy you buy directly from them. That’s why hundreds of customers have given us an average 9.8/10 rating and why we’ve been featured in all the major newspapers.