The used van auction specialist researched price performance over a basket of 5,000 vehicles earlier this year from a variety of sellers including corporate and dealer sources, split by mileage.
For lower mileage vehicles, (sub-50,000 miles) BCA saw a 3.5% uplift in performance against CAP. This rose to nearly 4.0% for vehicles that had covered 50- to 100K and rose again significantly to a 10.4% uplift on vehicles that had covered over 100k.
BCA’s head of commercial vehicles, Duncan Ward commented: “In an increasingly competitive used van sector, vendors need to make sure they present their vehicles in the best possible way to attract the buyers. Put simply, if a service history that could be present is missing when the van is sold, the seller is potentially sacrificing up to 10 percentage points on the return to the company’s bottom line.”
Ward added: “For commercial vehicles reaching the used sector for the first time, it is critical that the service history is present when it is sold. On older vehicles that may have been resold several times, even a partial history is better than none at all and can help to improve sale performance.”
He continued: “A service history shows the vehicle has been well maintained by the previous owner and confirms that a warranted mileage is correct as declared. And it is the latter that can have a real, tangible effect on the potential prices vehicles might achieve. Building buyer confidence is hugely important, particularly with the rise of digital selling and even hardened trade buyers value the comfort of knowing their judgement is supported by a comprehensive history file.”
