Im buying a used car. Its a ginormous pain in the ass. Because Im not following conventional routes and trying to eliminate the middle man.

Im cheap and I think 10-20% dealer markup is too much so I'm trying to get prices to the point where I can get the car at or slightly above auction price and that is very difficult. The dealer profit is equal to 6 months of ownership or 2+ weeks of work for me so its hard to part with that much money for the "service".

The first problem Im tackling is trying to figure out what the wholesale price for a RX350 is. This should be theoretically easy because the market reference price is published by a company called Mahneim that does all the dealer auctions as MMR (which I think means middle market reference). Unfortunately they are a sort of Monopoly that only makes this data available to dealers so I need to find someone that had access and pay them to pull the numbers for me. I cant really build that kind of data up on my own because I have no idea what cars actually sell for and the Craigslist volume is too low (with too many variables miles, year,condition,features). Ive been told that even with that data handy I will have no luck negotiating a price close to this value. Perhaps this is true but I don't really see why there would be any cars at Auction then, as there is clearly costs to take a car to auction so why not just sell it to me for slightly above that... Im told that that dealers wont go that low, but some of these transactions have to come out at cost or bellow because otherwise the auction market wouldn't really exist.

The secondary possibly even more difficult problem is having someone act as my proxy to bid on the vehicles. That makes for some possibly complicated financial transactions and escrow services. Assuming that I can even get to this point. I cant even get though the first gate. I have some leads but so far no bites.

The alternative is Craigslist... Not a bad alternative but volume sucks and sellers are retarded when it comes to pricing (not in a good way). Lots of people want more then the dealer advertised price... because Magic... Or stupid, and even better form of magic. Also dealing with peoples financing payoff and associated escrow problems is just as bad as dealing with the auction escrow paperwork.

From all this I did get a bit of interesting bits of insight thats worth sharing:

The best advertised prices seem to be at Off brand dealers : eg. Buying a lexus? Look at the BMW or Mercedes dealers.

The dealers with the best advertised price are also least likely to move on price, so when negotiating is smart to call the guys with the high prices and use the low advertised prices to try and push them down.

If anyone has a buddy that has access to the Manheim auction data let me know. I'll pay to pull some data for me for Pacific Northwest Lexus RX 350s. If they want to be my proxy bidder I would also pay for that service as well.