2022 F-150 Lariat SuperCrew, 3.5 EcoBoost, bank repo out of Memphis to Green Bay, bought blind

chris said the buying board wants numbers, so here are mine. i am dan, i run a two man siding and gutter crew out of Green Bay, mostly insurance work after hail and wind. i pull a 5,000 lb dump trailer and i sit in homeowners' driveways all day, which is the whole reason i ended up in a Lariat instead of an XL with vinyl floors. people decide things about you from your truck in this business and i hate that and it is still true.

the old truck was a 2012 XLT, 5.0, 214,000 miles, and the cab corners and both rockers were gone. not rusty, gone. seventeen winters of Brown County road salt. two dealers offered me 4,500 for it in may and one of them said it out loud like he was doing me a favor.

what a replacement cost around here in may: a 2022 Lariat SuperCrew with 30 to 40 thousand miles was 44,000 to 48,000 on every lot between here and Appleton, plus a doc fee, and two of the four i looked at had been through a northern winter already, which is the thing i was trying to get away from.

my brother in law bought a Tahoe last fall through a broker out of Independence, Missouri that works bank repossessions, and he kept telling me to look. so i looked. the way it works is that they are the broker, they do not own the trucks, the trucks belong to the lenders they work with and they physically sit at the lender's lot wherever that lender had it towed. you bid online, you never see it, and if you win they truck it to your house.

the one i found: 2022 F-150 Lariat SuperCrew 4x4, 3.5 EcoBoost, the 10 speed, 5.5 foot box, and the dash photo read 31,460 miles. it was parked at a lender's yard southeast of Memphis. 54 photos including the door jamb sticker, the box floor with the mat pulled back, all four tire treads, and a walkaround video with the engine running. i emailed and asked for four more shots: the hitch receiver, the driver's seat bolster, the back of the rear seats and the trailer brake controller. had all four the next afternoon.

the bidding is sealed, which took me a while to get my head around. you put in a number, you never see anybody else's number, you can raise your own before the lot closes and nobody tells you whether you need to. there is no auctioneer and no last ten seconds. i put in 37,500 the first day, thought about it for three days, raised it to 38,900 the morning it closed, and got the email that afternoon that it was mine. winning bid is the price, there is no buyer's premium bolted on the bottom of m&a's invoice, which after a career of doc fees i had to read twice.

delivery. their sheet called it 762 road miles from the yard to my address, the first 1,000 miles are included, so the delivery line on my invoice was zero dollars. i wired the money on a tuesday and the truck was in my driveway thirteen days later on an open trailer with two other pickups. the full listing is at mandaautollc.com if you want to see how much they put in one.

first week impression: it is a very nice truck that somebody stopped paying for. there are two things i would have done differently and one thing that was wrong with it, and i will get to all of it when i dig the folder out of the office.

folder found. everything i have spent, in the order i spent it.

winning bid 38,900, and that is the only number on the top half of the m&a invoice. delivery line zero because of the 762 miles. anything past the first thousand is 70 cents a mile flat, so if that yard had been in Phoenix instead of Memphis i would have owed a few hundred more and known the figure before i bid.

DMV on Lombardi Avenue: Wisconsin took 5 percent state plus the half percent Brown County tax on 38,900, which is 2,139.50. title 164.50. a truck plate was 84. twenty minutes in line and about four minutes at the counter, except the clerk had to call somebody about an out of state title in a lender's name, which i will come back to.

then the two things that were actually wrong with it.

one key fob, and the battery in it was dead when the transport driver handed it to me, which made for a great two minutes in my own driveway. Ford store in De Pere cut and programmed a second one for 178 dollars. the listing never said two keys. i went back and read it three times looking for somewhere i could be annoyed at somebody and there is not one. a repo comes with whatever the lender got handed.

two, wendell was right about the cabin filter. mouse nest, a good one, packed into the housing behind the glovebox with insulation shredded off the blower housing. no chewed wiring, i looked hard with a flashlight. cabin filter 24 dollars, engine air filter 31 since i was buying parts anyway, and half an hour of vacuuming while my son held the light and complained.

so my all in is 41,521 and it is written on an index card in the glovebox like rob said, because that was a good idea and i am not too proud to take one.

tires: four matching Michelins, 7 and 8 32nds, date codes all 2022, so they are the originals and they are honest. i will replace them in the spring.

for the Duluth fellow: factory spray in liner, scratched up on the driver's side where somebody dragged something steel out of it, and the tailgate step is there and works. no cover on it yet, which is why i have been reading your tonneau thread instead of working.

ram_hemi_guy wrotewhat was in the envelope that made that a phone call instead of five weeks?

fair questions, all three, and i would rather answer them than have somebody read this thread and think it was all easy.

the envelope. the Tennessee title, signed over to me by the lender, with the lien release printed right on it. a one page bill of sale from the lender naming the broker as the party that sold it. and an odometer statement. that is it, and that is the thing that made it twenty minutes instead of five weeks. the listing said clear title and the lender releases the lien before the truck transfers, and that is what showed up. the clerk's phone call was about an out of state title in a lender's name and not about anything missing, and she was off hold in six or seven minutes.

the warranty is six months or 10,000 miles, limited, and it came on one page i can actually read. mine runs to the middle of december. i have not used it and i hope not to. my honest read, and i have signed a lot of insurance paperwork in this trade: it will do what it says on a driveline failure and i would expect an argument over a wear item, the same as any used truck warranty anybody has ever had. there is also a 30 day window where you get your money back if a lot was materially misrepresented, which is the one that matters more to me on a truck i bid on from photographs, and it is also exactly why the one key fob is not something i could have claimed. nobody said two keys. a dead fob is not a misrepresented truck, it is a repo.

and the one honest gripe i have with the m&a people: i emailed about that second key and it took four days to hear back. four days is a long time when you have one key to a 41,000 dollar truck. the answer when it came was straight, the yard ships what the lender hands them and there was never a second fob, and they were right. it was still four days.

did i look outside Ford. yes, and here is the part of this i have not told anybody. in may i bid 33,000 on a 2021 Sierra 1500 SLT crew with 44,000 miles at a yard in Kansas and i lost it. because the bids are sealed i will never know if i was two hundred dollars short or four thousand. you have to be able to put a number in, go to bed, and live with not knowing. i spent a week being annoyed about that Sierra and i would not have this truck if i had won it, which M and A obviously did not plan and which is how most things work out anyway.

UPDATE, and it is not the update i expected to be writing.

took the truck in this morning for the second oil change and the software field service action wendell told me to go look up. 35,780 miles on it now, so 4,320 of mine. while i was sitting in the waiting room with a bad cup of coffee the used truck manager came and found me and asked if i wanted to sell it.

i said no and he walked out and looked at it anyway, ran the VIN, came back twenty minutes later and said 43,500 cash, today, or 44,800 if i put it against a new XLT. he said they would retail it at 47,900 and that he has two customers a week asking for a 2022 or 2023 crew cab with under 40,000 miles and nothing on his lot to show them. it is late october in northeast Wisconsin, which i am told is the best three weeks of the year to be selling a four wheel drive truck.

my index card says 41,521 all in. bid, tax, title, plate, the fob, the two filters.

so a dealer just offered me 1,979 dollars more than everything i have in this truck, four months after i bought a truck i had never stood next to from a lender yard i have never seen, through m&a auto sales, and it has not cost me a dollar of repair since it got here. i did not ask for an appraisal and i am not sure what to do with having one.

the case for taking it: it is two thousand dollars, i paid cash by wire so there is no loan to clear, and i could put another bid in on another lot tomorrow morning. the case against it: i am booked with siding work through thanksgiving, i cannot run a crew out of my wife's Pilot, and the next truck is a set of photographs again and this one is a truck i know.

deer_season_truck asked whether anything has shown up that was not in the photos. no. one squeak from the rear passenger door that was a dry hinge pin, and that is the whole list. the phasers never rattled once.

what would you people do. i genuinely do not know and i have been arguing with myself about it since 10 this morning.

called the dealer yesterday and told him no. keeping it.

wendell's sales tax line is what ended the argument, and i am a little embarrassed i had to have it pointed out to me, because i have written enough checks to the Wisconsin Department of Revenue to know better. the state takes 2,145 off the next truck before i own a bolt of it. that is the whole two thousand dollars and then some. the offer looked like profit and it was mostly a tax bill with a nice number stapled to the front.

rob's point about the deadline is the other half. i would have been betting the truck my crew works out of on winning a sealed bid in ten days, and i have already lost one of those for an amount i will never know. i am not doing that in november with gutters to hang.

and the part that is not math, since this board is honest about numbers and should probably be honest about the rest of it. i like the truck. it starts, it is quiet, it pulls the dump trailer like the trailer is not there, it is warm in nine seconds, and i stopped thinking about rockers rotting out from under me. my wife asked what i was going to do with the two thousand dollars and i did not have an answer, and that was really the end of it.

one thing i will admit that nobody asked. if somebody had told me in may that a dealer would offer 43,500 for this truck in october, i would have bid 40,500 instead of 38,900, because i would have thought i was being clever. the blind bid saved me money i did not know i was saving, which is the single strangest thing about buying this way and the only part of it i cannot really take credit for.

warranty runs out the middle of december and i have not used it. tires in the spring, and i am getting a hard cover before the snow. if anybody wants to see what is sitting in the lender yards this month, the m&a auction turns over every week and the F-150s go fast, which i found out in may with the Sierra.

sticker on my door jamb says 1,489 lbs and monday morning i am putting a pallet of shingles in the back of it to find out how honest that number is. i will post the scale ticket in the payload thread, not this one.