radman07

Lets try this again....

I never would have thought that the value of a 2013 GS 350 AWD luxury package (32k miles and NEW tires) would drop so much. My lease is up in February and I have started shopping around to see what another lease would run. My lease buyout is about $35.5 and I have 5 payments left. Basically two dealers have told me that if I trade in my car now I have negative equity. How is this possible when I see these cars selling as CPO for the mid-40's. And most of these cars are equipped with the standard package. Now I am starting to winder if the buyout price is too high given the current state of the auto market..............

i am seeing some really crazy lease deals since there is $2200 lease cash being offered by Lexus right now. The lease price of a F-sport is something like $52k and the purchase is $54k. But here is a question...how is the lease buyout price calculated? I was told that for a 27 month lease the residual is 68% of MSRP. Why is the residual not based on the actual sales price of the vehicle? i am starting to wonder if I got ripped off when i leased this vehicle about three years ago....

Or has the leasing market changed so much that all the brands are fighting each other?

Thanks for your comments.....

flippd

The fact that the residual is based on actual price actually makes your monthly lease payments much cheaper.

Lease buyout is simply residual + (monthly payment x remaining months left on lease). Your car does have quite a bit of miles in it. Also, the CPOs posted may have lower miles, and likely have a bit of wiggle room in it to haggle it down. Check the KBB / NADA price on your car to see how much it should go for in a dealer, and compare that with your buyout to see if you really have negative equity or not. It's not perfect, but it's a starting point. You may also want to check CarMax, but they also lowball luxury cars there.

Also, in the used market, the 'extras' we pay for when the car is new depreciates much more than the car itself. So you end up with Luxury vs Premium used being much closer in price than new ones.

radman07

Just check NADA and clean trade-in in 41.6k and the clean retail is 45.4k....just as I had suspected..

Joeb427

iTrader: (1)

Tough getting a NADA trade number.

flippd

They probably know you're going to return the car anyway in 5 months. Maybe you can pit them against each other and have them counter each other's offers.

radman07

I might actually buy it out....since I put new tires on the car rides great....it killed me to do this but the Michelin tires really didn't last and when I invoked the warranty they screwed me......gave me basically nothing for the tires wearing out early....

SW17LS

You're coming at this the wrong way. You want the buyout/residual price high. A high residual makes your payments low. If the residual were more in line with what the actual value was at the end...your payments would be way higher. Hence why my 2013 GS is only $80 a month more than I was paying for my 2010 ES...despite being a $20,000 more expensive car. ES had a 50% residual...GS has a 60% residual. You didn't get screwed, you got a great lease with a great monthly payment. If the residual value on your lease was what the market really was at the end your payments would be around $1,000 a month.

Wait until the end of the lease when no more payments are being added to your residual for the purposes of buying it out, and see what you can do. If you can get your buyout, trade it. If not...turn it in. Thats the beauty of a lease...ultimately you don't really care what the real resale value is.

Dealers want to sell you a car, but sometimes they aren't smart enough to think outside the box in such a way as to get a deal done. Bottom line is if you can't get your buyout now...just wait...every month the buyout goes down by the amount of each lease payment you pay.

As for buying it out to keep it, I love my GS too but the bottom line is its not going to be a great value to buy it out, and the lease deals now are even better than when you leased yours, so you can get into a new one and probably save $100+ per month. Gonna be a hard sell to buy it out. My payment is $700...and that was a great payment when I got mine. Would I buy it out for $36k when I could lease a new one for $550 a month? I'd be crazy to. If I was going to buy it and keep it forever, maybe. But buy it and keep it another year or two? Much cheaper to just lease a new one.

Afrosheen

Buying out a 2013 with the old nav/apps system in the dash is a bad idea anyway. 2014 and 2015+ have better processors and more updates available. The 2013 was left behind like some kind of engineering fault. RES+ isn't even available, when it's available on almost all other models.

If I were the OP, I'd trade it in on a 2015 in 5 months and sign a new lease. Tech moves fast.

SW17LS

The nav/tech isn't so important to me that I wouldn't not buy a 2013 if I were shopping for a 2013.

TonyCarson

We just bought out a 2013 GS 350 F sport lease from another CL member. It had 17,030 miles when it arrived to us, and the Lexus buyout price was $44,250. It had every option including illuminated door sills. We have never leased a car and we like to keep our cars for a long period of time, and I was finding 2013 models with 40-60k miles still going for $40,000 with same options we figured it wasn't a bad deal.

It doesn't hurt our credit was good so our interest rate was only 2.9% on a 84 month loan (which we did so payments were super cheap just to be safe), and we plan to make double payments and just pay it off fast.

If the GS-F comes out or the 2016 offers a lot more we might trade it up, but I feel the GS offers a lot of bang for your buck...I have never felt like such a VIP while driving a car...I would just keep paying your lease like others said until contract is up, then check your buyout price as that time.

Good luck!

SW17LS

Well the buyout price will be what it is, it doesn't change. What happens when you try and trade out early is all the remaining lease payments are just added onto that buyout price. So if the buyout is $35k, and your payment is 650 and you have 6 payments left you add $3,900 to the $35k, $38,900 and thats what you need to get on trade to get out of it at that point.

At the end of your lease the buyout price will be what is written in your lease agreement.

jjscsix

It's kind of like doing your taxes. If you get money back it just means you have been having too much deducted. If you complain because you owe money it just means you were enjoying life just a little too much during the previous year.

SW17LS

Precisely.