Post: #1

Hey guys, I hope this finds you all well.

I've got a pretty strong corporate gig that allows for regular travel, but I'm at the point that I want to start building an exit strategy. I've already got some rental real estate and I will continue to expand that enterprise, but that's a slow grind with a longer-term payoff. I'm starting to explore what I can do in the short term to rake up a little extra scratch and begin building something to replace my day job.

I'm well-versed in the mechanical trades so I have quite a bit of knowledge regarding various kinds of tools and equipment. I've had some pretty good success picking up stuff on my local Craigslist and reselling it on eBay. The challenge there is finding a sufficient supply of items to flip and the relatively small dollar volumes. It's a pretty good gig, and I'll keep my eyes open, but I'd like to expand into something with a little bigger payoff.

I'm curious about the used car biz. I've got three of my own personal vehicles that I need to sell, consolidate, and upgrade. Perhaps to facilitate sales, I can accept trades and make a few more dollars selling the trades. Without a dealer's license I can only have maybe six vehicles titled in my name in any given year, so there's a limit there.

I'm thinking about maybe trying to partner up with a small buy here/pay here car lot and see if I can find one that might be willing to work out some kind of arrangement where they would allow me access to their dealer license in return for some of my expertise in other areas that would benefit them.

Maybe its not cars. Maybe its construction equipment, motor homes or golf carts. I'm not sure at this point. I've got the capital to buy the stuff and could offer financing like the above-noted buy here/pay here car lots.

There's an interesting thread over on the body building forum that deals with this topic. Out of respect to our host, I won't post a link to another forum, but it shouldn't be too hard to find.

I'm thinking out loud here. Post up if you're in a similar mindset or have any relevant experience and expertise. Mech, you reading this?

Cheers,
Bone

Post: #2

I know in Mexico a car lot is worth it. I have a contact who flips American cars in Central mexico for a good profit.

Car lot in America can be cool. I think we have a few players who run car game. I remember I wanted to buy a car and went to an auction. I saw around 15 car with about 100k in miles go for less than 2k. It was a dealers only auction so I couldn't buy. Thats what got me interested .

You go to a used car lot anywhere in America and any decent vehicle with 100k goes well over 3500. Profit margin is huge. From what I understand the process to get a dealers license and own a lot is cheap at least in Texas. 30k could cover you for 6 months overhead and 5-8 cars. You sell one or two a month and you are good. You have mechanical skills that will lower your overhead. Just have to look into the liability laws in your state. I started to research back in '09 but couldnt find a partner.

Post: #3

(05-15-2013 10:31 PM)TexasMade Wrote:  I know in Mexico a car lot is worth it. I have a contact who flips American cars in Central mexico for a good profit.

Car lot in America can be cool. I think we have a few players who run car game. I remember I wanted to buy a car and went to an auction. I saw around 15 car with about 100k in miles go for less than 2k. It was a dealers only auction so I couldn't buy. Thats what got me interested .

You go to a used car lot anywhere in America and any decent vehicle with 100k goes well over 3500. Profit margin is huge. From what I understand the process to get a dealers license and own a lot is cheap at least in Texas. 30k could cover you for 6 months overhead and 5-8 cars. You sell one or two a month and you are good. You have mechanical skills that will lower your overhead. Just have to look into the liability laws in your state. I started to research back in '09 but couldnt find a partner.

Yep, we're thinking along the same line. I could see renting some small hole-in-the-wall place just to satisfy the license requirement for a physical location and selling a car or two per week by word of mouth and/or Internet via CL, eBay Motors, AutoTrader, etc.

I'd prefer to get my feet wet with an established dealer just to see how the game is played. I guess a potential problem there is it would be seen as training one's future competition. That's why I'm thinking to offer some expertise that a small buy here/pay here might not have such as expertise in establishing a web presence, photo/video production for marketing, etc.

Although I generally don't favor mixing business and pleasure, I see some gaming prospects here as well.

Post: #4

If you had connections to a body shop, you could possibly get damaged cars at a significant discount and fix your way to a profit. I would avoid salvaged titles obviously if you were trying to get an easier sale. I have looked into this every now and then when I want a nicer car but too cheap to pay the KBB values.

Post: #5

(05-15-2013 11:03 PM)samsamsam Wrote:  If you had connections to a body shop, you could possibly get damaged cars at a significant discount and fix your way to a profit. I would avoid salvaged titles obviously if you were trying to get an easier sale. I have looked into this every now and then when I want a nicer car but too cheap to pay the KBB values.

Good call on the repairs. Just as with real estate, finding busted cars with the "right" things wrong I think would be the key: Won't crank, just needs battery/starter, minor electronic or fuel delivery problems. All relatively easy to fix but should allow for purchasing at deep discounts. The trick would be avoiding the ones that had overheated and/or major mechanical issues.

Regarding buying below book, every day people sell stuff ridiculously cheap just because they can't manage their money. A CL ad that states "I buy cars (trucks, motor homes, golf carts or whatever) for cash would probably blow your phone up toward the end of the month.

Post: #6

Well bone you're in luck today. I'm looking for someone to get that license and work it from my place. I asked Ali to do it but he didn't really want to. I just hate the paperwork but got everything else ready to go.

Post: #7

I used to work for a guy that would buy used cars from Florida and drive them up to NJ to sell.
He would buy up cars like Caddies and Jags that were left after the old dudes died. Evidently
there are tons of these down there.

Post: #8

(05-16-2013 07:47 AM)el mechanico Wrote:  Well bone you're in luck today. I'm looking for someone to get that license and work it from my place. I asked Ali to do it but he didn't really want to. I just hate the paperwork but got everything else ready to go.

Hey dude, I was hoping you would roll in here. We should talk. I'm pretty strong on the paperwork side as well as Internet marketing, sales, finance and other things technical.

I'll PM you later this morning.

Post: #9

I was going to start a thread on this but it seems to be a good topic for this thread as well.

There are Chinese companies that make replica guitars of famous musicians. They sell them pretty damn cheap
as well. I haven't played any personally but my friend has and he seems to swear by them.
There are some youtube video of Chinese replica reviews you can check out.

The value in the guitar is the novelty aspect of it and not the overall quality obviously. It's really cool to have
a clone of a guitar played by Eddie Van Halen or Randy Rhoads.

You can easliy order a dozen of them and piece them out one at a time on craigslist or ebay.

Check it out: http://www.rareelectricguitars.com/

Post: #10

Slow money ^^^

Parlay why don't you make bitcoin miners and sell them on Criagslist? I'll buy one

Post: #11

(05-16-2013 08:52 AM)el mechanico Wrote:  Slow money ^^^

Parlay why don't you make bitcoin miners and sell them on Criagslist? I'll buy one

I actually looked into that. Not sure if it's worth the effort or even electricity to run them.
They sell for like $20k though.

Post: #12

Check out http://www.dhgate.com

It's a Chinese wholesale website. They sell everything you can imagine.

Post: #13

(05-16-2013 09:39 AM)Parlay44 Wrote:  Check out http://www.dhgate.com

It's a Chinese wholesale website. They sell everything you can imagine.

Here's another - and the one that I seem to hear about most frequently:

http://www.alibaba.com/

Its the one mentioned in that long-running thread in the /misc. Some of the minimum quantities are pretty high on Alibaba, but I think there may be an express version of the site with lower minimums.

Post: #14

(05-16-2013 09:00 AM)Parlay44 Wrote:  

(05-16-2013 08:52 AM)el mechanico Wrote:  Slow money ^^^

Parlay why don't you make bitcoin miners and sell them on Criagslist? I'll buy one

I actually looked into that. Not sure if it's worth the effort or even electricity to run them.
They sell for like $20k though.

Try 2k

Post: #15

I wonder if you could mine bitcoins using a virtual machine running from a cloud server like rackspace. Thoughts?

Post: #16

Another angle on cars, especially those buy here pay here places - from what I have heard - the down payment is usually what the dealership paid for the car. So those payments are just interest gravy. And they have devices which can automatically shut down a car so you can repo it easy.

Post: #17

(05-16-2013 03:03 PM)Parlay44 Wrote:  I wonder if you could mine bitcoins using a virtual machine running from a cloud server like rackspace. Thoughts?

I don't think so. Those GPUs need huge fans. I want to tap into a free power source (that I'm going to create) and mine some coins. A lot of them.
http://tampa.craigslist.org/hil/sys/3802463570.html

Post: #18

(05-16-2013 03:03 PM)Parlay44 Wrote:  I wonder if you could mine bitcoins using a virtual machine running from a cloud server like rackspace. Thoughts?

Generating the hashes on virtual hardware would be way too slow, I would think. Even the big GPU-based systems are being left in the dust by the new generation of ASIC-based mining rigs. These systems run the hash generation algorithms directly on the chip making them many orders of magnitude faster.

As the blockchain gets bigger, more CPU cycles are required to generate the hashes, so its a constant race toward the fastest platforms as the old systems get left behind, consuming more power than the value of the hashes they generate.

Take a look at what's happening with the hash rate over the last year:

http://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

Unless you can scam a source of free or nearly free power, the days of basement bitcoin mining are drawing to a close.

Post: #19

someone's already thought of running one off of solar power, right?