Private sale or dealer?
the honest accounting, both ways

Almost everything written about this question is written by somebody who wants to buy your car, which makes it worth reading carefully. We buy cars for a living, so treat this page the same way — except that we are going to start by telling you the thing that works against us.

A private sale usually pays more. Not always, and not by as much as people expect once the real costs are counted, but the headline number is typically higher. The interesting question is not which route pays most. It is what the difference works out to per hour of your time, and whether you want the job.

There are three realistic ways to sell a car in Columbus, and the gap between them is not arbitrary. It is a straight function of who absorbs risk, who pays for reconditioning, and who has to wait.

A private buyer pays the most because they are buying a car to drive, not to resell. There is no margin built in, no reconditioning budget, no warranty exposure. They also take on all the risk that something is wrong with it, which is exactly why they are cautious, slow, and full of questions.

A buying center pays less than a private buyer, but the gap is narrower than most people assume, because there is no vehicle on the other side of the transaction. You have a car, we buy cars, and the number stands on its own.

A dealership trade-in almost always pays least, and the reason is structural rather than dishonest. Your car is one line in a deal with three other lines — the new car price, the financing, and the term. Those can all be moved to make a monthly payment land where you want it, and the trade figure is the easiest one to move.

This is the part that gets left out of the comparison. Selling privately is not a transaction, it is a small project, and it has five distinct pieces of work in it.

This is the single biggest practical difference between selling privately in Ohio and selling privately somewhere with looser rules, and it catches people out constantly.

Your signature on the title has to be notarized in person. A notary or deputy clerk has to watch you sign it. You cannot sign it at the kitchen table and hand it over, and you cannot sign it and post it. A pre-signed title cannot be notarized after the fact — at that point you are applying for a duplicate and starting again.

So a private sale in Ohio requires you and a stranger to be in the same place, during business hours, both with current photo ID, with an unsigned title, at a notary. On a Saturday afternoon that is a scheduling problem. If your buyer works the same hours you do, it can take a two weeks to find the slot.

Two details worth knowing before you get there. If your title is electronic there is no paper to sign at all, and the sale runs on form BMV 3770 instead, with both seller and buyer notarized. And where two names appear on an Ohio title, both people sign — Ohio issues titles with the conjunction "and", never "or".

Once it is done, the buyer has 30 days to take the notarized title to the BMV. Until they do, the paperwork trail still leads back to you, which is the reason the next section matters.

A private sale does not end when the money changes hands, and two loose ends cause a disproportionate amount of trouble in Ohio.

The plates are yours, not the car's. Registration in Ohio follows the owner, not the vehicle. The plates come off before the car leaves. If you leave them on, whatever that car does next — tolls, tickets, a camera, worse — it does under plates registered in your name.

Do not cancel your insurance when you agree a price. Cancel it when the title has transferred and the car has gone. The window between handshake and completion is exactly when you least want to be uninsured on a vehicle still legally yours.

None of this is difficult. It is just a list, and it is the seller's list. When you sell to a licensed dealer it becomes somebody else's.

Do the arithmetic before you commit to the project, because the answer varies enormously by car and most people never run it.

Take the private-sale figure you think you would get, subtract the offer in your hand, and you have the gap. Then count the hours: photographing and listing, replying to messages, no-shows, test drives, and the notary appointment. Two to three weeks of intermittent effort is normal. Divide the gap by the hours.

Sometimes that number is excellent and the private sale is obviously worth it. Sometimes it comes out below what you earn at work, on a car you are still insuring and still making payments on while it sits in the drive. Both answers are legitimate. The mistake is not running the calculation.

One more line in the arithmetic that people forget: a car you are still paying for costs you every week it does not sell. If there is a loan on it, the payments during a three-week private sale come straight off whatever extra you were hoping to make.

There are cars where we would tell you to sell privately, and we would rather say so than waste your afternoon.

And the mirror image. These are the situations where the private-sale premium usually evaporates once you count what it costs to chase it.

You do not have to choose before you have the numbers. Getting a written offer costs nothing and takes a day, and it converts a vague sense of what your car is worth into a floor you can negotiate against.

That floor is useful whichever route you take. If you list privately, you know the number below which you should simply stop. If a private buyer stalls, you have somewhere to go that week rather than starting over.

And if you already hold a written offer from somewhere else, bring it to us — we beat it or hand you $250. Terms apply. Competing for your car is a great deal more straightforward than trying to talk you out of a better one.

If you want the whole picture in one place first, our guide to selling your car in Columbus answers the questions that come before this one.