Buying project cars in auction can be a relatively easy way to make money. I have found that by purchasing project cars as time went by has made me a substantial amount of money. Nevertheless, I'm sure you are assuming that these project cars were all repaired and cleaned to as new condition as they could be. In fact, we did repair some of them, but most of them were sold at auction on the Internet at EbayMotors in the condition they were purchased in. You may be wondering why I did not repair them to good condition to get maximum sale price out of them? Well, sometimes the worst thing you can do to a good deal to spend money on it. For example, I paid $3,300 in auction for a GMC Yukon which had 70,000 miles on the clock. It was a trade in at a local new car store and it had a lot of damage to the surface body and poor bodywork on it. It had good tires though and the interior was in pretty sound condition. After bidding and buying it, to my surprise, I found it drove really well. So now I have two options.

One option is to spend another $3,000 for paint and bodywork, $200 for the windshield...and another $175 for a detail with total price including the original purchase of $6675. And this all takes time and effort just to get it on the market. If the truck is finished and looks great, I'm going to ask $9,500 for it and may have to negotiate down around $8000 to $9000. That would earn me around $2,200. Sounds good but here are the problems:

1. What if the bodyshop does a less than perfect job of painting? You're not paying for a retail job so it may not be retail quality. What if they take too long to finish all the work - wholesale jobs are lower priority.
3. The time required for the sale of the vehicle can be as long as 2 or 3 months, because it is just like any other super slick GMC trucks in the market and it has nothing special about it.
3. All the other unpredictable things that can happen over time when you wait on a commodity for too long (hail damage, broken windows etc).

Or, what happens to most of my great automotive bargains that we get our hands on, we simply sell it at online auction without undergoing any work on it. We originally paid $3300 for the vehicle, listed it online in auction and sold it to the highest bidder for around $5500 or so in 5 days. So, we profited $2,200 in 5 days. No headaches, no time and money spent on repairs etc. Why did this work? Because it stood out in the market from all the other GMC trucks out there.