How to Price Used Golf Carts on the Lot: A Dealer’s Method

How to price used golf carts comes down to three numbers you already have: what you have in the cart, what carts like it are listed for within your buyer’s drive, and how fast your last ones like it sold. Then a clock: decide on day one what happens to the price if the cart is still there later. New carts get a different method, covered in how to price new golf carts.

Why does a good used cart end up with the wrong price?

Because the number got picked in ten seconds, from memory, from across the lot.

Picture a Thursday, 4:15 in the afternoon. A lifted four-seater rolls out of the shop with fresh batteries and new seats. Your salesperson has a buyer coming Saturday and yells, “What are we asking for this one?” You are on the phone about a parts order. You remember what you allowed for it on trade. You add what feels right. You yell a number back.

That number goes on the tag. Nobody writes down where it came from. Nobody decides when to look at it again.

Six weeks later the cart is still out front. Nobody can say whether the price is wrong, the photos are bad, or the cart never made it onto the website. So somebody knocks a little off. Then a little more.

The fix is three numbers and a clock, on paper, for every used cart before it goes out front. Used golf cart pricing for dealers is a method, not a mood.

How to price used golf carts in seven steps

The whole method. The sections below take the steps one at a time.

1. Add up the all-in number. What you paid or allowed, what you put into it, what it costs to hold.
2. Check the market from your phone. Ten minutes. Carts like it, where your buyer will look.
3. Pull your own history. Your last three like it: listed, sold, days.
4. Set the number and write down why. One line.
5. Set the review dates. Before the cart goes out front.
6. On a review date, fix the showing first. Photos, listing text, where it sits, whether it is on the site at all.
7. If it still needs a cut, make one that matters. Once.

What do you really have in the cart?

Three things, added together.

What you paid or allowed. The check you wrote, or the allowance you gave on the trade. What to pay for a cart coming in is a separate job, covered in how dealers put a number on a trade.

What you put into it. Every part and every hour. Batteries, seats, tires, the detail. Count your tech’s time too. Getting a used cart ready for the front line is its own subject. So is where you buy your used carts. The first is in golf cart reconditioning, and the second is in where do golf cart dealers buy used carts.

What it costs to hold. The cash tied up in it. The spot out front a fresh trade could have. The wash and the charge every week it sits. It is not zero, and it grows.

Add the three. That is your all-in number. It is the floor. It is not the price.

The buyer standing next to that cart does not know what you have in it, and she does not care. She knows what the one down the road is listed for. Your all-in number tells you where you cannot go. It never tells you where to start.

What is your buyer comparing it to?

Whatever she can see from her couch tonight and drive to on Saturday.

Take ten minutes on your phone, because that is what she is holding.

Look for the same kind of cart. Same seats. Lifted or not. Same battery type. Close in year, hours and condition. A two-seater off a fleet is not a match for a lifted four-seater, no matter how close the years are.

Look where your buyer looks:

• The other dealers within her drive. Their sites, cart by cart.
• Private sellers on Facebook Marketplace in your towns.
• Your own lot. If two more like it sit out front, she is comparing those too.

How far is her drive? Use the towns your last ten deliveries went to, not a circle on a map.

Write each cart on one line: seats, lift, battery, year, hours, condition, asking price, dealer or private seller, how far away. Five or six lines is plenty.

A listed price is an ask. It is not a sale. The highest cart on your list may have been sitting since spring, which is why you can still find it. The lowest may be a private seller with no shop behind the cart. The lines that matter are the two or three closest to yours in kind and condition.

How do you set the number and the review dates?

Start with your own history. It is the best pricing information on the lot, and it is already in your deal jackets.

Pull your last three like it. Three things on each: what it was listed for, what it sold for, how many days it took.

Now you have all three: the floor, what the buyer sees, and what carts like this one did at your store.

Set the number. Then write one line saying why. The line is for the salesperson on Saturday and for you in six weeks.

Then, before the cart goes out front, set two review dates. Pick them from how fast your own carts sell, not from a rule somebody else wrote. The first is about when a cart like this is gone at your store. The second is about when your slow ones finally went.

Here it is with invented numbers.

Say you have a made-up $5,400 in a four-seater: $3,900 allowed on the trade, $1,350 in batteries, seats and a detail, and $150 you figure it costs to hold. Your ten-minute check finds five like it, and the two closest are listed at $7,400 and $7,600. Your own last three were listed at $7,495, $7,295 and $7,895. They sold at $7,350, $7,295 and $7,100. They took 11, 16 and 48 days.

Read those three lines. The cart you priced highest sat the longest and brought the least. The two priced lower sold fast, close to the ask.

So this one goes out at $7,450. The line you write: “Have $5,400 in it. Nearest two listed at $7,400 and $7,600. Our last two priced here sold inside three weeks. New batteries and seats, so it sits between them.” First review date: three weeks out. Second: seven weeks out.

Every number in that example is made up, the dates included. The method is the part to keep.

What do you change before you touch the price?

The showing. On a review date, check four things before anybody reaches for the tag.

Is the cart on the site at all? Stand next to it with your phone and find it on your own website. A cart that is not online is not overpriced. It is invisible.

Are the photos real and current? Taken after the shop finished, in good light. The shot list is in how to photograph golf carts for sale.

Does the listing text tell the cart’s story? Seats, lift, battery type and age, hours, what your shop did to it. If the text says “nice cart, call for details,” the price has nothing holding it up. The fix is in how to write a golf cart listing.

Where does it sit? The back row behind the service trailer is a price cut you gave away for nothing. Move the cart up front, facing the road, washed and charged.

If any of the four was wrong, fix it and give the cart a fresh stretch. The clock on that price starts the day a buyer could actually see it.

In the 72-cart case study, a dealership selling about 24 carts a month sold 72 aged carts in 45 days, in winter, worth $587,284. What was done: the online showroom was fixed first, then demand was turned on, buyers got a video before they came in, and the sales team got one sales process. Notice what came first.

If the showing is right and nobody is looking, that is a demand problem, covered in used golf cart dealer marketing.

When is a price cut the right call?

When the showing is right, buyers have seen the cart, and the market still says no.

You will know. The cart is online with good photos and real text. It sits up front. People have looked. A couple took a ride. Every offer landed in the same place under your ask. And the ten-minute market check, run again today, shows carts like it listed under yours.

That is the market telling you the number. Listen once.

Make one cut that matters. A cut that leaves your cart above the carts a buyer is comparing it to changes nothing. A cut that puts it beside them, or under them, gets it a fresh look.

Then change it everywhere in the same hour. The tag, the cart page, every listing. Tell the floor. Write the new number, the reason and the next review date on the sheet.

Know the floor too. If the market is under your all-in number, that is the owner’s decision, not the salesperson’s on a Saturday afternoon. How aged units fit the bigger picture is in golf cart dealer inventory management.

Why does the used golf cart price belong on the cart’s own page?

Because your buyer is running her own ten-minute check, and a cart with no price does not make her list.

Think about the check you just ran. Which carts got a line on your sheet? The ones with a number. The “call for price” carts never did.

There is a second reason. A used golf cart price sitting alone is just a number. On the cart’s own page it sits next to the photos, the hours, the battery age and what your shop did. That is the plain job of good golf cart dealer websites: one cart, one page, one price, kept current.

The full case for showing the number is in should golf cart dealers show prices online.

How do you price a cart you put work into versus one sold as-is?

Same three numbers. Different story, and a different set of carts to compare against.

A cart your shop went through competes with other dealer carts that were gone through. Its all-in number is higher because of the work, and the work is the reason for the ask. So the work has to show: in the listing text, in the photos, in the salesperson’s mouth. Work the buyer cannot see is money you spent and cannot ask for.

An as-is cart competes with private sellers and the lowest lines on your market check. Price it against those. Say plainly on the tag and on the page that it is sold as-is, and say what you know about it.

The market check also tells you whether to do the work at all. If gone-through carts like it are listed well above the as-is ones around you, do the work. If the gap is thin, sell it as it sits.

How does a salesperson defend the number without a discount?

With the cart’s story. That is what the one line is for.

Picture Saturday, 10:30. A buyer stands next to the four-seater and says, “There’s one in the next town for less.” A salesperson with no story has one tool: “Let me see what I can do.”

A salesperson with the sheet says what was done. A template for the floor:

“That might be a good cart. Here is what I know about this one. Our shop put new batteries and seats in it last month and went through it front to back. Here is the list. Ask them what was done to theirs. If it is the same work, that is a fair comparison.”

The number holds when three things match: the tag, the cart page and the salesperson. When they do not match, the buyer negotiates with whoever sounds least sure.

Decide once who can move the number. The salesperson tells the story. One person, the owner or the sales manager, owns any change. The words for the rest of that conversation are in the golf cart dealer sales script.

The one-page pricing sheet and the Friday review

One page. One row per used cart. Copy these columns:

• Stock number and a short description: seats, lift, battery type, year, hours
• Where it came from: trade, auction, fleet
• Paid or allowed
• Put into it
• All-in number
• Market check: the date, and the two closest carts with their asking prices
• Your last three like it: listed, sold, days
• Asking price and the one line of why
• The day it went out front and the day it went on the site
• First review date and second review date
• What changed at each review: photos, text, spot, price

A clipboard works. So does a shared spreadsheet. Every used cart gets a row before it gets a tag.

Then Friday. Fifteen minutes, sheet in hand:

1. Which carts hit a review date this week?
2. For each one, run the four showing checks.
3. Which carts got looked at and asked about, and which got nothing?
4. For carts on their second date, run the ten-minute market check again.
5. One decision per cart: fix the showing, hold, or make the one cut. Write it down with a new date.

Keep it with the rest of your Friday numbers in golf cart dealer KPIs. If one person runs it every week, that is part of what a sales manager should own.

What are the common mistakes in pricing used golf carts?

Five. Good stores make every one of them in a busy week.

1. Pricing off what you paid alone. The buyer never sees your side of the deal jacket.
2. Pricing off the highest listing you can find. That cart is still listed for a reason. Price near the carts closest to yours.
3. No review date. With no date, the first time anyone thinks about the price is when the cart is in the way of the fall trades.
4. Every cart ending in the same round number. When every used four-seater on the lot wears the same tag, nobody ran a check.
5. Cutting a little every week. Small cuts teach buyers to wait and teach your floor that the tag is a suggestion. Fix the showing. Then one real cut.

Where does Cart Launch fit?

We do not price your carts. We do not appraise your trades or decide your discounts. Your team does that, because your team knows what you have in each one.

What we build is the online showroom the price lives on. Every cart has its own page with real photos, a real price and the details in text. Your team keeps it current from a phone, so the cut you make on Friday can be on the cart page Friday. You see which carts got looked at and who reached out, which is one of the signals a pricing review needs. The domain and the content stay yours.

A number set with this much care should not live on a tag only the people already on your lot can read. That is the case for a golf cart inventory website.

If your used carts carry a number on the windshield and nothing a buyer can find from her couch, book a call.

Keep reading

• Golf cart trade-in appraisal: how dealers put a number on a trade
• Should golf cart dealers show prices online? Yes, and here is why
• Golf cart dealer inventory management: aged units and what to do with them