What is sensible deposit to ask a.buyer for to secure our van?
Someone viewing tomorrow morning!
Going back to the original question, having just sold my Camper, what happened was the interested party did a £500 Deposit via Bank Transfer to reserve the van.
This was subject to a successful viewing and test drive. I stated in my for sale advert that a desposit was required and was refundable minus any costs incurred (so if paid via Paypal for example, the deposit would be returned minus the Paypal fees).
As a slight aside, I have looked into this area and there is no such thing legally as a non-refundable desposit. A seller can only retain what they have lost by when taking a deposit lost out on a subsequent sale - so if buyer A pays £500 for a £20k van and doesn't turn up, and Buyer B buys the van for £20k from the same advert, seller has not lost out and is legally obliged to return the £500 to buyer A even if they said it was non-refundable. Sellers terms do not trump the law.
Terms for the deposit was viewing to take place by the weekend. They actually clicked the "Buy it Now" button on eBay as well the evening they paid the deposit just to reiterate their interest!
Viewing Saturday Morning, test drive carried out by buyer. They took out
insurance on the Camper before they came over in order to be able to drive the vehicle themselves (apparently there is an option to pay a small extra amount to allow a cancellation and get your premium back? not something I was aware of but handy for a buyer who is confident they are expecting to buy what they are coming to look at).
Saturday afternoon, deal was done and balance transferred. Money received instantly. They had previously been in touch with their bank to check about any transfer limits and pre-warned them that a fairly large transfer would be taking place. The bank logged that on their account in case of any 'fraud flags' coming up which often happens with atypical transfers.
Also some banks have quite a low transfer limit of just £10,000 a day - fine for just about anyone day to day, but not on the day you buy a motorhome!
This messed up a friend of mind who was selling his Autosleeper and the buyer could only do £10k transfers - leaving him over £30k short of the funds to pay for it
Ended up in a not good or very friendly situation of the seller calling a taxi to send the buyer off to the Train Station to go back home a few hundred miles away! No sale and no doubt hurt feelings all round.
So that was my own run of events in the last few days anyway. All very straightforward.
What I also did was to delay doing the New Keeper Transfer for a day to allow the buyer to get home without worrying about tax (road tax is cancelled the instant the transfer is done, and the new buyer must get it taxed immediately, but sometimes that is not possible (I bought a T5 and after it was registered in my name the DVLA system would not let me tax it at all! I had to declare it as SORN first to 'reset' the tax and THEN tax it in the normal way))