[Closed] Trying to buy a van!

Super high demand and low supply pushing up prices.
Lots of business holding on to vans, some are doubling up to allow social distancing of workers getting to site. Amazon and delivery companies increasing fleet numbers. Now is not the time to buy a van unless you have to.

Now is not the time to buy a van unless you have to.

Not least because you're helping to push up the price and narrow the choice for people who really do have to. Wait a year or two, there'll be a glut of vans on the market.

I appreciate its not a great time to be buying but my car has died so I need a vehicle. So its either buy another car which isn't really appropriate for me or look for a little van with the hope of keeping it going a good few years. Regularly sleeping in the back of a car isn't great really especially coming into winter. I live in a remote area so just going to the pub for the evening generally means kipping in the car.

Rather than take a loan of £4k to bring the budget up to £10k take out a credit card with a 0% interest free introductory offer, that's what I did for mine.
I had about £3k, my van was £4.5k. Barlcaycard gave me 2yrs interest free, I ought the van with that and then out my cash into premium bonds and added to it utill I had enough to pay off the card when the offer runs out.
If 2yrs is long enough for you that's much better than a loan.

Having the same problem. I'm looking into an L2H2 kind of size to convert and allow me to move up north but still visit the office when I have to. £6k for that size seems to be 130k miles and no service history which is very daunting given my only dalliance with patchy service history led to a full engine rebuild on my last car...

It's not just vans . Cara are also jacked at the moment

High demand.

I was looking for a van for for about two months, gave up, keeping my old one. Not due to the lack of vans but the lack of interest from the motor trade.
My van and car are both Nissans from my local dealer, did live chat with them and gave them email mob number etc for a salesman to ring back. Three weeks nowt. Rang them up and spoke to a new starter who assured me they would call me back. Waited 2 weeks, nowt.
Then one of their other dealerships rang me out of the blue as they knew my last instalment was near on my van and could they sell me a new one.
Promised to get back to me with a p/ex price for my van, waited, nowt.
Rang two dealerships from Autotrader who both asked me to put a deposit down on a van without me even seeing them and one of them hadn’t even come into their garage yet. Asked them for a p/ex value on mine and neither got back to me.
Out of 15 garages I got in contact with 3 got back to me. If I ran my business like that I would be bankrupt in 6 months.

I haven't been following this closely but it seems demand is sky high.

I have a Peugeot Expert 2017, which I was planning to change this year, but thankfully never happened as covid kicked in.

In March, the dealer was offering 9K trade in.
I put details into webuyanyvan over the summer and they were offering 12.5K

They emailed me a couple of weeks ago telling me they were now offering 14.5K

Iknow they would beat that price down if they actually took a look at the van, but it shows the trend.

Out of 15 garages I got in contact with 3 got back to me. If I ran my business like that I would be bankrupt in 6 months.

Aye, if what you were selling took a bit of actual selling. They don't have that issue, selling like hot cakes.

It's a great time for them, must be great not having to chase folk, believe me in normal times they'll spend a whole lot more time chasing bellend time wasters than anyone will chasing salespeople.

Im in North Cornwall but imagine i’ll need to travel really to get a good deal.

Yup, I'm in SW Scotland, had to train it to Cannock to get what I was looking for!. Tbh I always find the whole Midlands area is the best place to get vans anyway, just due to the sheer amount of delivery etc infrastructure in that area.

VW t5.1? £10k would get a good one. I know they're costly due to scene tax but they shouldn't depreciate as much as the others as they keep their value better

where have you seen a t5.1 for sale for £10k

I feel your pain OP.

Half tempted to sell my van while the price is inflated and buy again next year.

Except I already sold the car because it was worth more.

We've just bought a 2003 LWB vivaro, 95000 miles on the clock with a brand new conversion in the back, perfect bike van/stealth camper. Cost £8,000 - was more than we were willing to pay initially. After some research & re-calculations of budget realisng that even if we self converted we'd need to double that for a van about 10 yrs old.
After some Facebook we managed to be 1st in the queue & the fella had several other people in the queue.
Was older than I wanted but so far so good...

The part that's going to kick the OP in the teeth is it was in Redruth...

I know this doesn't help the OP.
But from this thread out of interest I enquired how much I'd get for my 2018 Peugeot partner, we buy any car would give me over £3500 more than I owe on it, which was a nice surprise.

Indeed SB mate wants a wagon like mine and we are seeing them commonly for 9500 with 40k on the clock in the same age/ spec

I paid 8900 for mine 3years ago. And it still doesn't have 40k on clock .

Like wise it's tempting to sell the post bus just now given the boom in camper sales..... Could have had many years of fun for free.....

The pain would be finding another to replace either.

can't have cake and eat it I guess.

Presumably once the Brexit transition period is over the price of most new vehicles will go up, pushing up price of second hand too? So maybe better not to wait?

For a van the size of a Dispatch, why not buy the likes of a Renault Espace and chuck out the spare seats?