These days, there's no shortage of places to shop for a car online. Sites like Carvana offer a bounty of clean, inspected pre-owned vehicles for those who want to buy a car outright, while places like Cars.com and AutoTrader let you scour the nation's inventory of new and used rides from home. Then there are the auction sites: eBay Motors may have been among the first, but in recent years, a whole crop of car nerd-focused auction sites have sprung up — sites like Bring a Trailer and Cars & Bids, which have created communities of fans around the idea of selling cooler-than-average rides in a gamified format.
Upstart car auction site Wall Street Motorsport is the latest to this scene, having launched just last month. And they're doing so with a splash: if you list your car with them right now, they'll actually pay you for the privilege.
That said, you can't just list any old junker on there. Like BaT or C&B, only cars of a certain provenance will do; it doesn't necessarily have to be a Ferrari (though you certainly can find those on there), but odds are good that you won't see many cars on there that haven't been the subject of someone's fantasy.
Should the car you submit be accepted for a listing, not only will it receive an unexpectedly witty write-up on the site, but you, in turn, will score $100 — whether or not your car sells. The promo applies to any vehicle listed during the month of March.
"I crunched the numbers and decided that we could actually offer to pay sellers $100 to list/sell with us and still be profitable," Wall Street Motorsport founder (and former right hand man of rally legend Ken Block) Matt Tuccillo told Gear Patrol. "It’s a complete 180 compared to how others in the space operate and do business, but, I feel that as a new player in the space, why not shake things up and try something radically different, ya know? My business model is built to be fluid, and we have the ability to do this in an effort to gain some market share, so, let’s try it."
Indeed, providing a place for car buyers and sellers to operate without as much hassle of fees and surcharges sits at the heart of the rationale for Wall Street Motorsport's existence, to hear Tuccillo tell the tale. "After almost bidding on an F430 Scuderia last summer on a competitor’s platform, I realized what I’d be paying in just fees and was like, 'that’s ridiculous,' he said. "So it planted the seed that we could probably build something that was more fun, had a better look and feel, and could be financially better for buyers and sellers."
As a result, Wall Street Motorsport doesn't charge sellers anything to list on the site — versus Bring a Trailer's $99 listing fee or Cars & Bids's $49–$89 ones — and only charges a 3 percent buyer's fee, compared with BaT's 5 percent and C&B's 4.5. (WSM caps that fee at $3,000, too, versus BaT's $5K cap and C&B's $4,500 one.)
That said, if you aren't quite ready to part with your car just yet, fret not — you might still be able to score that Benjamin in your pocket.
"If it ends up being a good program that people like? Maybe it stays for longer than March," Tuccillo said.
