Never heard of a branded title, but I always steer clear of salvaged cars.

Better to be safe than sorry on the long run.

 

"Branded Title" is just car selling biz term for basically ANY of the various terms different states (and provinces I suppose, for our friends north of the border) will use to "brand" the title of a car, supposedly permanently, whether it is a "salvage" title, "flood damaged", etc. I normally don't tell too many people this, kind of a dirty secret, but yes I worked as a used car salesman for a while. Other than the BORING slow times, it actually could be a fun job and worked with a fun group, but the old "branded" trade in car occasionally rolled in and amazingly quite often the would be buyer was NOT honest about his/her (usually a guy!) trade in's bad title and these days with EVERYTHING on a computer, we'd find out almost immediately. Since we sold new Hondas (I just sold used, often a tougher sell, but way more potential $$) we had ZERO interest in any branded title car as a trade in.

That was over 10 years ago and I know its even easier now to tell, the mgrs were carrying bar code readers, I think as a phone app or something, which reads the VIN right when they first look at the car, since they don't want to even bother doing the usual "5 min walkaround" if its a bad title, its just done right there.

Now, that's NOT saying that there aren't SOME very well repaired cars out there with branded titles, as someone mentioned, many are "flipping" these cars, which right away makes me think of people who "flip" homes vs people who do top notch renovations on homes.

Now, I'd think most of your top notch renovations are on high end, classic homes worth sinking big $$$ into, yet I've also heard too many stories of someone buying a poorly rehabbed home, where some clown covered up a bunch of problems and sold someone a heap of trouble. Difference is that even if someone does an awful rehab crap job after watching too many "flip your house" tv shows, it can certainly still be repaired and be a great home again, if it makes $$$ sense. A branded title is there for life, other than if someone pulls some sort of fraudulent runaround to get that dropped, which I'm sure is much tougher now in the tech age.