Buying and Selling an Avanti using AOAI

[ronmanfredi]

Selling an Avanti can be challenging for many and sometimes an interested buyer never sees a car that is for sale.  Since these cars are being sold through fragmented methods throughout the country, one thought is to create a marketplace connected to AOAI to bring sellers and buyers together to facilitate the selling and purchase of these cars.  While this would take quite a bit of effort and time to get started, it could end up benefitting all concerned.  Besides the back-end programming of the website, we would need to contact anyone who is selling an Avanti and encourage them to list their car with AOAI.  This includes individuals, used car dealers and national classic car dealers. A thought to go along with this is to charge a nominal fee for the listing.  Just thinking out loud this could be a simple $25 fee paid to AOAI as a basic 12-month sales membership for a single car sale, or a higher $$ multicar fee for a dealer who could list as many Avanti's as he had for sale over a period of a year. These low-cost memberships would keep AOAI as a non-profit automobile club yet provide some income to offset the ever-rising cost of doing business.

In addition, what if some of you were interested in becoming a paid expert advisor for a buyer who is looking at a car but needs help due to a lack of knowledge?  The advisor would charge a fee to discuss the vehicles condition, review photos and make suggestions as to what the buyer should do next.  On the reverse side, a seller could ask the advisor for help as well. The advisor would have a profile on the site with fees advertised and the ability to take internet payments such as Zelle, Venmo, Cash App, etc.

I am interested in positive thoughts and comments from you about how this could work in your mind and ideas not mentioned here.  I know all about the amount of work and time that this would take and about the number of sellers who wouldn't want to spend the time or money to participate.  So please, if this is not of any interest to you, then thanks for reading.

One more thing to support this.  I have worked for nearly 18 months trying to locate the owners of 2001-2007 Avanti's.  In this journey, I have personally contacted every owner of these cars that we have found and had really good communication with them by phone or email.  The last 2 that I found this year are widows who own these cars and would like to sell them.  I mentioned the AOAI magazine and how they could use it to advertise their car for up to a year for free by joining AOAI for a year.  Or they can pay AOAI $30 plus $15 a photo to list the car in the magazine for 2 issues. (this was the pricing that Lew provided on my inquiry).  Within a couple of weeks, the 2 women became members.  It seems to me that this is an opportunity here.