Quote:
Originally Posted by Rasta Monsta
I bought a decent 924S from Copart for $500.
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Oh, sure. They have bonafide wrecking yards with normal prices. Up here they took over what used to be Fitz Auto Wrecking - a good, reputable auto dismantler, with locations all over Washington.
But their wrecking yard sales and the "virtual" auctions that insurance companies use to set salvage prices appear to be separate deals.
Copart How VB2 Works - find out how to buy your next vehicle at a VB2 car auction
The "Virtual Preliminary Sales" has gotta be something the insurance industry had them set up.
It works like this:
totally anonymous bidders bid on different cars in a "Preliminary" auction. The car is
not sold; the auctions take place before CoPart even has the title; the cars are listed by the insurance companies when they are totaled; CoPart conducts the auctions
as if the cars are really for sale, but the whole auction is play acting. The premise is that the participants bid the same as if they were really interested in the car.
The resultant bid is then used to set the salvage value for the insurance claim. What Safeco told me was that the CoPart virtual preliminary auction represented an actual offer - even if no offer was actually made - and so that price was given for the salvage buy-back price.
When CoPart receives the title, the car is sold in a real auction online - the VB2 auction.
The problems I have are that the preliminary auctions are completely anonymous - CoPart will not disclose who bid in any virtual auction. Nor will they disclose any other detail of what transpired. So the auctions are rife for rigging. If an insurance company wants a high salvage value, they just have their guy(s) log on and drive up the price. There are no controls whatsoever, so there's absolutely no way for them to get caught.
In my kid's case, even though the adjuster had originally told my son the salvage of his 951 would be $1,100, by using CoPart's virtual auction, they jacked that up to $3,000 - to offset the difference in valuation.
To counter that, we paid for a private appraisal that found the car, pre-crash was worth closer to $10,000. So that's when Safeco decided to use CoPart and jacked the salvage up almost $2,000 to cover the increased cost of valuation.
I can't imagine any lower life form than an insurance company.
Well, okay, maybe
lawyers... 