I have been following the #vanlife movement for six months now, and can’t get the idea of building one out of my mind. People are converting vans into miniature RVs and using them to travel the globe. This isn’t an entirely new concept — people were camping in Volkswagen busses more than 50 years ago — but the current state of these camper vans is something to behold. Some people live in them fulltime, while others are weekend warriors, venturing out for short stints on the road. Some spend a few thousand dollars on their conversions while some camper vans sell for $150,000 or more. Many of these vans have everything from showers and toilets to refrigerators and HVAC systems. I could talk about camper vans for a long time (I’m about to start a separate blog about them, in fact), but the bottom line is, I’ve decided I want to build one, and the first step of the process is to purchase a van.
(There are 100,000 examples of these camper vans on YouTube. If you haven’t seen one before, here’s a short video of one: YouTube Link)
Because of the economy, the pandemic, the supply chain, and various other reasons, used car prices are currently through the roof — vans included. I’ve been scouring the internet for a good starting van within my price range, but vans that cost $5,000 two years ago are selling for $7,000 or more today. Bad timing on my part. Two weekends ago I found one for sale that met all of my needs. The seller stood us up. Last week I found another one that would have been perfect. I contacted the seller two hours after he posted his ad on Facebook and was told a sale was already pending. Finding a van less than 20 years old with fewer than 200,000 miles that’s still in good mechanical condition has been a challenge. I check Facebook and Craigslist ten times a day trying to find the right one for me.
Last week, Susan discovered that our local auto auction (the Dealer’s Auto Auction of Oklahoma City, or DAA) was having a special consignment auction open to the public. Normally attending (or more specifically, bidding at) their auctions requires a dealer’s license, but this public auction of government (GSA) vehicles was open to everyone. Susan had a quick trip to Washington D.C. this week, but on Thursday I was able to pick her up from the airport and drive directly to the auction. We arrived literally minutes before the auction was scheduled to begin, and by the time we had registered for a bidding number, the first car was about to hit the auction block. During registration, we were handed a packet containing a list of all 88 vehicles that would be sold that day. The listing included the make and model of each vehicle, its VIN number, the mileage, and any obvious defects (peeling paint, ripped headliner, etc.).
One of the first vans to enter the auction was this white 2013 Chevrolet G3500 with low miles — just perfect for a stealth camper! Moments before the auction began I gently reached down and patted my pocket, ensuring the $7,000 in cash I had brought was still there. There’s nobody at this moment in time that knows the current price of vans better than I do. I watch online sales like a hawk and know exactly how much each one sells for. The vans at the auction were newer and had less mileage than the ones I’ve been looking at, but you never know what can happen at an auction. It would take a little luck, but maybe, just maybe, I would be able to drive this van home for $7,000 or less.
It sold for $29,400. To put that in perspective, if you dropped $20,000 from the selling price I would still have needed to borrow $2,400 from someone.
Surely, we thought, that price had to be an anomaly. Sometimes at the beginning of auctions bidders (especially novice ones) get overexcited and forget that you don’t have to buy the very first thing for sale. With more than a dozen vans up for sale, I hoped that prices would drop as the auction went on.
I was wrong. The opening bid for every van was $24,000, and prices went up from there. (That’s how an auction works.) The very last vehicle of the day was a red Ford 2015 T350 van with 76,000 miles. According to the damage report, in addition to nicks, dings and dents on every section of the van’s body, it also had a torn headliner and water damage.
It sold for $26,400.
You might notice something interesting in this picture. For a van that just sold at auction, there are literally no buyers to be seen. The only other guy still sitting in the stands with us was literally facing the wrong direction. Based on the sound of the auctioneer you would have thought a dozen people were bidding on this van, and I guess they were — they just weren’t physically there. The event was also being streamed live on the internet and accepting online bids. Just like on television’s Storage Wars, the auctioneers yelled “YUP!” and “YES!” each time the price increased another $100. The difference here was, for the most part the auctioneers weren’t looking people in the eye — they were staring at a flat screen television mounted across the bay, watching it for online bidders to click their mice.
The bidding bay wasn’t always empty. The most people we saw mulling around was around a dozen, most of whom were wearing polos embroidered with the logos of local businesses. For example, every van I looked at was also being inspected by a man from OK Work Trucks, a local business that sells vans and trucks that look suspiciously like the ones being sold at the auction. OK Work Trucks is conveniently located three and a half miles west of the auto auction.
If I sound like I have sour grapes over the experience, I really don’t. None of those guys were in the wrong place — I was. The cheapest car of the day was a small 2013 Ford C-Max hybrid hatchback with 40,000 miles and hail damage that sold for $13,200, almost twice the amount of cash I brought. I couldn’t afford it, and I certainly wouldn’t want to camp in it.
Back in a former life I used to regularly attend arcade auctions. At many of them I would see a bidder or two who showed up desperate to buy an arcade game — literally any game — who didn’t bring enough cash along. I specifically remember one such bidder who would quickly bid $100 on every single game that came up for sale, only to drop his shoulders as the bidding sailed away from him. That guy must have bid $100 on 50 different machines, and didn’t win a single one of them. At last week’s auto auction, I felt a bit like that guy.
Auctions are fun to attend, even if you walk away empty handed. It was interesting to see how their system works and I didn’t have a problem with the way anything worked. The auctions sold 88 cars at a rate of approximately one per minute, so there wasn’t a dull moment. I just didn’t realize how much vehicles there were going to sell for. For me, for now, it’s back to Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist in search of something a bit more affordable.
