Impact of Cat N status on price

P

parabolica

Member
Considering selling soon; unfortunately my insurance declared my car a Cat N after someone else messed up reversing into a parking space and ripped my front bumper off and crushed my front d/s wing. I retained the car, bought a replacement bumper and wing and had an alignment done to confirm there was no mechanical damage. Car is otherwise perfect again, just this issue with it being a Cat N.

Anyone got opinions on how this affects the sale price? Obviously I’ll need to adjust my price to account for it, but I’m not sure by what amount/percentage; googling seems to throw up such a wide range of opinions. Car is a 03 3.0, 84k and well specced if that helps.
 
Really hard to say and does limit your audience somewhat, i guess if you have pics of minimal damage it would help reassure any prospective buyers, I'd be looking for it to be at least a grand less than an equivalent car at the lower end of the market, if it was higher end.. say 12k then probably 2k off.

Id think possibly 2-3k for your car if its got good spec, i guess the best bet with something like this is the old ebay classified with best offers on a 30 day ad, you will undoubtedly get some ridiculous lowballs and lots of stupid questions but you should eventually get a genuine buyer
 
Minus 20 - 40 % is the fairly standard for a Cat N, the only one I've owned (an old system D) was bought and sold with a discount of about 30%.
But it's all about instilling confidence, having those pre-repair reports and photo's, plus evidence of parts purchased and competent repair will help your chances.
 
As above, the car being on the register limits the number of people that will be prepared to buy it...that's really the biggest issue. I've been buying cars and bikes from the trade and most of them have been from salvage dealers, for years. I've never really had a problem with any of them...but even I would hesitate to buy one that's already been repaired. I want to see what has happened to it. However, the longer it's been back on the road since it was damaged, the less it seems to matter.

I bought a Cat C, stolen-recovered, Subaru Outback when it was 2 years old. I ran it for 5 or 6 years and repaired the dents eventually! It sold on eBay for only about 10% less than a similar car that was advertised that week (my car was also a much better vehicle). The big advantage to me, was that in those 5 years it only depreciated about £2000, including the cost of repair.

The Since Cat N and S replaced Cat D and C, Cat N vehicles have sold for a tad more than Cat D; I suspect it's purely because N stands for non-structural.

For the best result, put pre and post pics in the advert and tell the story. Remember you must declare that it's Cat N: it's illegal not to.
 
Unfortunately I don’t have the pics from 2017 as I changed from android to iOS since. Got the emails about the claim but the pics aren’t attached there. Got the engineers report though that says what the damage was - specifically that it was panel damage only and no apparent damage to structure or mechanics. Got the hunter alignment sheet from afterwards too.

30% does seem to the be the consensus online too, that’s what I thought it would be.
 
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