2023 RAV4 XLE Premium AWD, 19k miles, bank repo out of an Ohio lender yard to Boulder

three days of reading here and the buying board is empty, so i will go first. 2023 RAV4 XLE Premium AWD, the 2.5 gas engine, 19,240 miles according to the photo of the cluster. the car had sat at a lender yard below Columbus Ohio since the spring. i live in Boulder. never saw the car, never sat in it, never drove it. 44 photos, a walkaround video and one phone call.

why we were shopping: our 2011 Outback got rear ended at the Baseline light in may and the other guy's insurance handed us 6,400 dollars and a lecture. we needed something that takes a 70 pound dog, two pairs of skis and my wife's four days a week into Longmont, and we were not interested in having a payment again.

my brother in law in Dayton buys service vans through M&A Auto Sales, a repo broker based in Independence Missouri. no lot, no showroom, nothing a person can walk around. whatever the bank takes back stays at the yard it got towed to and the bidding happens on a web page. this one was in Ohio, about ten minutes from a Costco i have been inside, which my wife found hilarious for reasons i still do not understand.

the listing ran 44 photos plus four minutes of video with the engine running: VIN plate, door jamb sticker, cluster, a tread gauge standing in each of the four tires, and the original window sticker out of the glovebox. i wrote back asking for the rear underside and the spare well. both were in my inbox before nine the next morning, no charge, and nobody tried to talk me into anything on the phone.

then the part everybody wants to know about. bidding is sealed. you write down one figure, and what you are never shown is anybody else's figure, or even how many people are in the running, and no email arrives telling you that you have been outbid. raising your own figure before the close is the one move available to you. so i did comps first. a Toyota store in Longmont had a 2023 XLE Premium with 26k on it at 28,995. a used lot in Thornton wanted 27,450 with 31k. two private ones on the front range at 26,500 and 27,200, both with more miles than this car. i decided anything starting with a 24 was a good buy and wrote 24,800 three days before the close.

won it. the invoice came back 24,800 flat with no buyer's premium, which took me two reads, because the auctions i have stood around in all tack 8 or 10 percent onto the hammer price and name it a fee. one other line on the invoice: delivery. their sheet put Columbus to Boulder at 1,290 road miles. a thousand of those come with the car and the other 290 are billed at 70 cents each, so the line read 203 dollars. wired the money monday morning from the credit union. eleven days later it came off an open 7 car hauler in front of my house at ten past eight in the morning.

the file was two pieces of paper. an Ohio title the lender had assigned to me, lien release stamped across the back, and one more page, a bill of sale, with m&a written on it as the broker. that is all there was. two things i will get to when somebody asks: the key situation, and what Boulder County charged me.

also_bid_on_that_rav4 wrotei bid on that car. i am in Ogden.

well. that is the first time i have seen the other side of one of these and i have been sitting here ten minutes not knowing what to type. silver with the black roof rails, 19,240, hatch open the whole video. same car. hello from the other end of the fence.

here is the honest part of blind bidding and somebody should staple it to the top of this board. i paid 1,400 dollars more than i had to. nobody misled me, the m&a people did nothing wrong, the listing was accurate down to the tire tread. i set 24,800 because that is what the front range wanted for the same car, and i was right about that, and i was also 1,400 over the next guy in the line. if i had written 23,500 i would have this car and a set of winter tires. i might also have lost it to Ogden and spent august looking at 28,000 dollar dealer cars with 30,000 miles on them.

you never get to find out which. that is the real trade in a sealed bid, not the "what if it shows up broken" thing people worry about out loud. anybody reading this thread to decide whether to do it should read those two paragraphs twice and work out if they can sleep on it. i can. my wife asked about it once and has not brought it up since.

do not apologize, the paperwork is exactly what i wanted on the record in here.

Boulder County clerk, the office on Pearl, 35 minutes start to finish, no phone calls. i brought the Ohio title with the lender's assignment and the lien release on the back, the m and a bill of sale, proof of insurance, and the VIN verification form the clerk's own website tells you to get first. one thing that made it easy, i think: the title came to me in the mail from the lender's title processor, not from the broker, so the chain the clerk read was bank to me, with the broker named on a separate piece of paper she barely looked at.

what it cost, since this board is about numbers. specific ownership tax 357, because Colorado prices that off 85 percent of the original MSRP and steps it down every year you own the car. plates and fees 92. use tax on 24,800 at the county window, 1,284. none of that is the seller's business, it is what a car costs to put on the road here, but people forget all of it when they hold an auction number up next to a dealer sticker. the dealer number already has that conversation hidden in the finance office.

the one thing genuinely wrong with this car: a single key. one fob, no spare, and it was written in the listing in the spot where they list what comes with it. i never read that line because i was busy enlarging tire tread photos. a 2023 RAV4 fob is not a 40 dollar blank off the internet. a locksmith in Longmont made a second one and coded it to the car, sitting in his van in my driveway, 230 dollars. the Toyota store had quoted 495. so, 230 and entirely my own fault for skipping the text under the pictures.

two months in. people keep emailing me instead of posting, so here it is in the thread. 22,600 miles on it now. mileage by hand over four tanks is 29.8 mixed, which is under the sticker and about what anybody with an AWD RAV4 and a driveway at 5,300 feet should expect. took it over Berthoud Pass loaded on labor day weekend, four people and the dog and a cooler, and it held 60 in fourth without the transmission hunting.

first frost here was the 2nd of october. the heated seats work, which was the only question my wife asked about this entire car. i ordered snow tires early because of the winter tire thread in the service board, 225/60R18 on a second set of wheels, which turned out to be lucky, because the shop said the ones on it were getting thin at the shoulders.

UPDATE. this one is a bill, not a brag. dropped it at the shop in Louisville on the 20th to mount the snow tires, and the kid working the counter walked out and asked whether i would come round and look at the rear of the car with him. both rear rotors rusted and scored, deep enough to catch a fingernail in, with a lip you could feel on the outer edge, and the pads worn unevenly across the face. ivan called this in post 3 in august, almost word for word: a car that sat in a wet Ohio yard with the parking brake set.

410 dollars, pads and rotors both sides, parts and labor at an independent shop, done in two hours while i walked over for coffee.

i did email m&a first, because the car is inside the 6 month limited warranty. the answer came back in five days and the answer was no: brakes are a wear item and a wear item is not a warranty item. i think that is the right call, and sitting on their side of the desk i would have written the same sentence. but five days is five days, and by day four i had written a much worse version of this post in my head. that is the one piece of this purchase that took longer than it should have.

so the car owes me this: 24,800 bid, 203 delivery, 1,284 use tax, 357 ownership tax, 92 plates, 230 for the second fob, 410 for brakes. 27,376, and what i have is a 2023 with 22,900 miles, a clean Ohio title in my name and four new brake parts at the back. the Longmont dealer car was 28,995 before tax with 26,000 miles on it.

their current list lives at mandaautollc.com and it turns over fast, so what is there in october is gone in november. i am not going to keep bumping this thread. if there is a number i left out, ask in the thread and i will go find the invoice.