After 23 years at its Reno location, Private Party Cars, LLC plans to open a second Carson City location in late August.
Why now? "It's the freeway," says owner and president Rick Gardener.
The new site, just half a mile east of the Highway 50 interchange on the Highway 395 bypass, was serendipity.
Gardener asked a Carson City acquaintance if he knew of anyone looking to sell property.
The man did, and a year later, in March of this year, escrow closed on a half-acre site.
Traffic count at the new location is 22,700 a day, slightly less than the 27,200 cars clocked passing the Private Party Cars location on Mill Street at Highway 395.
The business plan: for sale by owner.
Private Party Cars provides a lot where buyers and sellers meet in person to haggle a deal.
Gardener stays out of the sales process.
The benefits, he says, include security: Strangers will not be coming to your door at home.
Safety: There's no supervision of a vehicle left sitting out in a common area.
In some places it's not even legal.
Plus autonomy: There's no need to deal with a car salesman.
For those benefits, sellers pay a flat fee of $295 to rent a display space be it for three minutes or six weeks.
The average sales window, says Gardener, is 14 days.
For that fee, he posts a photo of the car for sale on four Web sites, yahooautos.com, carfax.com, autotrader.
com and privatepartycars.com.
The company will also run a CarFax report for the seller.
Those services, says Gardner, would cost sellers $167.50 to perform themselves.
Finally, the company will help sellers determine the right asking price.
Private Party Cars has an extensive database of actual sales.
While not interested in opening a vast empire of locations, Gardener has systemized the business so that others can emulate the formula."A lot of people ask me, how could I do this?" he says.
His answer: A business in a box that licenses the name and strategy.
The plan comes in three steps.
The first step is to read about the company online on its Web site.
Those who like what they see pay $125 to get the overview package.
If still interested, they pay $2,750 for literature, legal documents and five hours of Gardener's teaching time.
Step three, for a price of $29,200, buys the custom software package that integrates with the Web site, plus onsite consulting fees.
Gardener will only sell the plan to people who live outside of Nevada.
The trademark "Private Party Cars" is registered.
"I've sold 35 licenses in the past seven years," says Gardener, but he dislikes flying around the country.His priority is spending time with family while his children are still young.
In fact, he's become so inundated with requests of late, that he has removed the Web site link for the present.
Imitators fail, he notes, when they fail to follow the recipe.
The most important ingredient: stay out of the sale.
He cites auto dealers who have attempted to copy his plan, but notes they don't last they want the volume, he says, they want 140 units of inventory on the lot but they can't stay out of the middle of it.
"I have seen this business model come and go," says Gardener,"and the No.
1 reason I have been so successful is that I stay out of the deal."
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