bmay71

iTrader: (1)

I called the Costco membership auto program today. The gentleman on the phone told me the discount was a flat $3100.00 off of sticker. He said this was the amount costco had negotiated with Lexus. I was thinking this was low and that maybe I could haggle a better than this. What do you think? I am located in Atlanta so any salesmen referrals would be nice.

Modeler

Discounts negotiated by all such programs are never the best you can get. Very often they are a lot worse than what you can get by walking into a random local dealership without doing any preliminary research.

My suggestion is to e-mail or visit all your local or nearby dealers with a target price, say 2% over invoice, and see what they counter with. And by "nearby" I mean within a 2-3 hour drive.

Modeler

In case you don't know what the invoice is for the car you want, visit www.carsdirect.com or www.edmunds.com

SilverSprt

FYI..Just checked today and edmunds does not have the invoice price listed yet for the GS350

BurgBoxstr

I think kbb.com has invoice pricing. Edmunds did have it at one point b/c I pulled it when we bought our '07 GS350AWD in December.

The Costco program is supposed to be - they give you a copy of the "dealer" invoice (showing LDA & holdback) and add on a "fair" (their term for it ) profit. You can "always" do better of course. I used the Costco price to get my local dealer negotiating in earnest. Both my local dealers are owned by the same company so there isn't any competition and neither are part of the Costco buying service. Local guy kept claimed most he could give me was $1500 off sticker while 1st pass at costco dealer was invoice + $1200. I continued negotiations w/ a Costco dealer at the other end of the state and once I locked in on a good price (mostly phone & email BTW) at the Costco dealer, I then gave my local dealer one chance to match it. He came w/in $200 of it and since I didn't have to spend airfare or a day travelling to get it, I gave him the biz.

It's all a game my friend, they just want to see how willing you are to play in it .

lexneffect

Anything other than invoice for the GS350 or GS430 is too much in my opinion. I bought my car at $200 below invoice but most of the people I know have been able to get the car at invoice. Just depends on how persistant you are and if you don't look too excited, then they will try to deal with you a bit more.

steverhode

I must admit. I don't get it. Can someone explain it to me please?

Since new GS350s are normally AWOL at the local dealers here in CA, why would the dealer be motivated to sell it at anything other than very close to MSRP, much less anything as low as invoice price.

Nauticalx

I do not think $200 below invoice is the norm or even common. Especially in CA! Lexneffect, care to elaborate on who's gotten these deals besides you and how?

Kilroy

I got about $5,000 of sticker on my GS350 by negotiating with 11 different dealers.

JK

osokuko

I got my GS350 about 2 weeks ago and got a discount of 4K off MSRP. I think there was a little more room left. Probably anything 4.5K to 5K would take a little more effort but feasible.