Waiting to hear the first story of how somebody went in to a dealer asking ADM and was able to “work them down”. I know…no one would be willing to post such a silly story on here, but…it does make me wonder how long and what games the dealers will play, especially the ones asking $40K & $50K over MSRP?
So, back in the Gen 2 roll out and ensuing stealership clown show, the ADM era lasted about 15-18 months, mostly in urban areas. I had a call a cr@p ton of stealers, and even ones we had verified MSRP purchases listed here on FRF, all of them were falling through. I was somewhere north of 40 contacts and eventually landed one at a smaller establishment about 75 minutes from me, deposit down, deal agreed to all by text except for the deposit which I did by phone- and then they emailed me the contract. I visited 3 of them, the closest to me was out of allocations and wanted ADM but I never got past what they wanted since they couldn’t get any more. The other 2 were 10k over and 5k over, respectively. I went back to the 5k over place with my MSRP offer and they still wouldn’t budge and we were previous buyers there. This was December ’16. The 10k over place was actually a credit union buying service recommended stealer. They wouldn’t honor the agreed upon, negotiated price when I got there, paperwork and agreement with the bank be damned.
I found that the ones charging the truly outrageous ADM- I think 25-30k over was “outrageous” in ’16-’17, they weren’t interested in selling the truck at all. I know a few metro DC stealers kept the same Rap on the lot with the same ADM listed for almost a year. There were still new ’17’s on the lot along with ’18’s. Now, I bought early on so this could have some flex but it wasn’t until around March or so of ’18 that we started to see folks start to more frequently score under MSRP deals. Even then, there were still ’17’s available new. Why? because greedy stealers were sitting on them.
There were also reports of large stealerships buying Raptors from smaller, MSRP or low ADM stealers at asking price and then reselling at higher ADM. I don’t know about that part but there were a lot of reports of it.
The closest I got to “working an adm stealership down” was getting the 5k over stealership to say they maybe could consider going as low as 2500 over, but, it was an 802a truck but was short many extras I wanted- tailgate step was one, but I wanted it more because it had no moon roof or graphics. In the end, they wouldn’t follow through or engage further so I took the MSRP with another 2400 in options I didn’t want but ended up better off than flushing 5-10k down the toilet to finance some sales guy’s 4 month vacation to Tahiti.
The good news is that this is going exactly like it did in late ’16 and in a few short weeks you’ll start seeing Gen3 trucks on the secondary market from buyers who had to have the Raptor, but end up deciding it’s not for them or they bit off more than they can afford, wife doesn’t like it, divorce what have you. Not that any of those thing are generally good but rather it will be an opportunity for someone to score a truck and give it a good home.
