Russians massively sell cars due to a sharp drop in income

The used car market has revived after the spring collapse, employees of companies specializing in the sale of used cars told The Moscow Times. According to the sales automation service CM-Expert, on the three leading classifieds – Auto.ru, Avito and Drome, there are now more than 1.2 million unique offers for the sale of used cars (doubles are excluded), which even slightly exceeds the level of 2021 year and 40% more than in March.

The ad aggregator for car sales haraba.ru estimates the number of unique ads from July 1 to July 24 at more than 1.2 million, and confirms that this is higher than in June-July 2021, when, according to the aggregator, the ads advertised 1.16 million vehicles per month.

Growth comes at the expense of the population. Dealers offer the same number of cars as they did a year ago, but private traders woke up and began to actively put up cars for sale, says an employee of the center for the sale of used cars “Rolf”. According to him, this revival is forced: “The main difference is that if earlier almost all cars were trade-in to us, that is, their owners bought a new car to replace the old one, now almost all customers tell the same thing – forced to sell the car due to unpleasant circumstances.

“We had a relatively fresh Mazda CX-5 and an old Skoda Octavia, now they sold the expensive Mazda to maintain, because it’s already difficult to keep two cars, especially since they began to delay my salary, citing problems with payments, and my wife lost her job in a publishing house. business,” says a 40-year-old employee of a private IT company. Another interlocutor of The Moscow Times sold a 14-year-old Nissan at the end of June: “We left in early March, but after a couple of months it became clear that we would not be able to return quickly. And why should she just stand at the entrance, only pay the tax for her? Yes, and money will not interfere with us. ”

Now nobody really wants to sell cars, on the contrary, the owners are trying to extend the life of the car, realizing that you can’t buy a new car, so an increase in supply is not from a good lifeagrees an employee of another dealership selling used cars.

According to him, the supply of used cars is even slightly higher than last year, but about a third lower than in the summer of 2020, when there was already a pandemic, but there was still no shortage of new cars and a rise in prices. According to haraba.ru, in June-July 2020, there were 1.67 and 1.55 million ads for the sale of used cars, respectively.

However, putting up for sale does not mean selling. According to Avtostat, in June, Russians bought 353,000 used cars according to the results of data processing by Electronic Passport JSC: this is 8% more than in May, but 32% lower than a year earlier.

The decline compared to last year is a consequence of the reduction in trade in due to a shortage of new cars. After the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, about 20 companies left Russia. For six months, sales of new passenger cars in Russia, according to the Association of European Businesses, collapsed by 57% compared to the same period in 2021. Analytical agency Avtostat predicts that 600,000 new cars will be sold this year, which is 2.5 times less than last year.