Thank you Paul, for your interesting response. What’s coming across is..
1. There’s always a percentage of car sellers wishing to sell privately.
2. The majority of them are bad at it – naff images, descriptions etc.
Sorry for the long initial response, this is another one!
Although I agree with you that most private ads are very poor, there's a large number of factors that meant our analysis showed this market is shrinking. Plus, the area you can add value in is small and being eroded by dealer supply services designed to cherry pick the best cars from the private market. It will come down to whether the cost of your services and attracting the right customer is feasible.
As an example, the number of private sellers on Autotrader is small, has historically been less than 10% for quite a long time, it currently stands at 6.9% on Autotrader today. It's mostly at the bottom end of the market too, so as you say, many private cars are on free sites like Gumtree, Facebook, or low cost sites like eBay.
Much of what's for sale on those sites is in poor condition; e.g. lots of damage, mechanical issues, high mileage, missing or no service history etc. These cars sell cheaply and sellers don't want good photos and lots of detail, as they're trying to avoid talking about or showing the issues if they can. For these people they'd never pay for a service like yours.
For better quality cars, you'd have to write the descriptions to stand out, highlighting the good/bad and detailing service history/documentation, as that's what buyers want if they're going to pay strong money for a car privately. Can you make money and get people to pay for that as service on top of taking photographs?
The final sticking point is that dealers are now prepared to pay very good money for these cars too. It used to be hard for private cars, other than part ex, to get in to the dealer network, and WEBAC offered low valuations as they went to auction.
That's not such an issue now, Cazoo and Motorway offer strong private sale values for good cars often, so WEBAC have followed suit in many cases and now sell direct via Cinch. I sold a car to a dealer on Motorway recently that would have got £7k-£7.5k in top condition privately, however it needed new front tyres, the bonnet painted and a service soon to achieve that sort of value (it had FSH & was very good other than that), it would have cost £650 to £750 to do the work. The dealer paid £6.5k on a £6k estimate (with all issues listed) via Motorway, as they can retail it for £8.5k-£9k after doing the work...
It's car dependent to an extent, with better prices paid for more popular models. Just to check we weren't going mad when we reviewed it earlier this year, I did a quick check now on Autotrader, as I'm looking for a car to replace our aging mini. A 2016 MINI Hatch 1.5 Cooper, with 2 owners, 34k miles, up for sale for £10k exactly (Autotrader private guide is £10,150, dealer £11k-£12k). Motorway expect to get you £9,950 from a dealer (they often get more), Cazoo offering £10,700 to buy it now haggle free! Why would you ever sell that car privately for £10k?
So the question is, with Cazoo, Cinch, WEBAC and Motorway all having significant backing and all three advertising heavily on the TV/internet, can you attract the right customer demographic and right cars, plus help the customer sell their cars at a high enough price to make this work?
