Is Memorial Day a Good Time to Buy a Used Car?
CARS.COM — If you’re thinking of using your long Memorial Day weekend next month to shop the dealerships for hot sales on a used car, truck or SUV, that time might be better spent barbecuing. According to automotive research website iSeeCars.com, Memorial Day is one of the worst days of the year to get a deal on a vehicle.
Related: How to Inspect a Used Car
In fact, it appears you may as well just enjoy your long Memorial Day weekend, take the whole summer off and wait until at least fall before returning to the dealerships to shop for discounts on a car or truck. By then, the current vehicle model year will have ended and car owners in large numbers will have begun trading in their vehicles for new cars, increasing inventory, iSeeCars said, pointing to its survey of 40 million used-car sales from 2013 to 2015. The study, which defined a deal as 5 percent or more below market value, concluded that September through February were the best months for a bargain — with particular discounts, savings and incentives to be celebrated on the holidays within that period, of which Memorial Day isn’t one.
The biggest “holiday” for used-car deals as defined by iSeeCars? Black Friday — meaning that if you play your car-sale cards right, you can snag a sweet deal on a car to go back and pick up that 70-inch flat-screen TV you got for $14 at Target at 12:01 a.m. According to their calculations, you’re 33.1 percent more likely to get a used-car discount on Black Friday, followed by other November holidays Veterans Day and Thanksgiving Day.
The top 10 holidays for used-car shoppers to score a deal, followed by the percentage by which the number of deals on that holiday exceeds the average, are:
10. New Year’s Day, 15.8 percent
9. Halloween, 18.8 percent
8. New Year’s Eve, 21.3 percent
7. Christmas, 21.4 percent
6. Christmas Eve, 28.7 percent
5. Martin Luther King Day, 29.4 percent
4. Columbus Day, 30.5 percent
3. Thanksgiving Day, 30.6 percent
2. Veterans Day, 32.5 percent
1. Black Friday, 33.1 percent
All of those holidays, you’ll notice, occur from October through January. March through August is the most expensive time of year for used-car shoppers, according to iSeeCars. On the Fourth of July you should just sit tight and enjoy the fireworks because dealers aren’t exactly exploding with bargains; research shows there’s 28 percent less of a chance of getting a good price on a car. Meanwhile, Memorial Day is the fifth-worst holiday for car-buying incentives, tied with Father’s Day, with 18 percent less of a chance of snagging a car deal at the dealership.
Here are the top five holidays not to celebrate with a used-car purchase, with percentage less of a chance of getting a deal:
5. Memorial Day/Father’s Day (tie), 18.3 percent
4. Good Friday, 21.6 percent
3. Easter, 22.2 percent
2. Mother’s Day, 27.5 percent
1. Fourth of July, 28 percent
Phong Ly, iSeeCars.com CEO, explained that the study’s purpose was to provide those in the market and shopping with a broad period of time during which their time is best spent hunting for deals. So-called conventional wisdom could lead consumers to pay more than they need to at the dealer. For example, iSeeCars determined that contrary popular belief, the first day of the month on average offers 8.5 percent more deals compared with the 5.6 percent of the last.
“It’s always nice to save money, and when you are buying something as expensive as a car, saving even 5 percent of your purchase, or $952 off the average price of $19,040, can really add up,” Ly said in a statement. “But it’s hard to get the savings if you can’t find the car you want, so we assessed which times of the year had the greatest number of deals.”
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