Despite the endless innovations over the past decade, the automotive sales industry has failed to provide sellers any direct benefit. Unfortunately, private sales are still tedious and require the commitment of trust and coordination between two unknown parties. The only existing alternative is to go to companies like CarMax and other dealerships who often severely undercut market value.

Here at LotBlok, we are disrupting the used automotive industry.

By providing an intuitive solution to relieve the symptoms which have plagued vehicle sales for decades, our consumers earn the best value for the car all from the comfort of their own home. Here’s a look at a few of the problems our customers tell us about everyday.

Complicated

For those of you who have never sold a car before, it’s difficult to know where to start. The defacto standard in the United States has become some combination of listing pictures on Craigslist or shopping around your vehicle to dealerships and/or the local CarMax. Outside of some brief research on Kelley Blue Book, it’s increasingly difficult to know the fair value for your vehicle and more importantly, how to effectively sell it at that price.

Time Consuming

Even for consumers who have experience selling vehicles in the past, there’s no denying that the process can take days, weeks, or even months from start to finish. Professionals often take upwards of 60 days to sell a vehicle. As an everyday driver, this time frame becomes much longer. Even worse, finding a buyer is often only half the battle. From car titles to insurance papers, the current system is inefficient as paper documents are complicated, slow, insecure, easy to lose and tough to replace.

If you’ve ever spent time waiting in line at the DMV, you’ll know what we’re talking about. The current systems for vehicle transfers are slow, tedious and prone to failure. Vehicle transfers become even more problematic when the existing documentation cannot be verified. Ultimately leading to increasingly long processing times for ownership transfer.

Risky

Most purchases are often the first time two individuals come in contact. Beyond ensuring that a local listing is up to par with the seller’s claims, there’s a vast range of discrepancies associated with the vehicle’s history, previous owners, and overall maintenance. Important documents can be forged or edited, making title transfer and vehicle transport a potential risk that the buyer has to account for.

Introducing LotBlok

For the first time in history, consumers are now able to bring their car directly to the auction market. LotBlok’s platform provides an intuitive, trusted solution for consumers and auction houses to interact in real-time. Our system enhances the quality of vehicle listings by automatically populating information through our patented VIN-scanner.

Once a listing has been populated and posted by a consumer, LotBlok sends a verified third party to process a Condition Report (CR) on the vehicle being sold. LotBlok’s customer support team guides the consumer through the entire process to coordinate an appointment and communicate what documents are needed to expedite the process. Our system leverages postcard sales (i.e. auctions based off pictures and the online listing itself) that can occur within auction house dealer networks as soon as a condition report has been finalized.

The best part — LotBlok only takes a small flat fee on the transaction. This means that the lion’s share of the sale price goes directly to the seller’s pocket. Once an auction is finalized, LotBlok coordinates the pick-up and delivery of the vehicle from the seller’s home directly to the buyer’s lot.

Why is this so revolutionary?

For those of us unfamiliar with how auction houses operate, it is currently illegal for auction houses to cater directly with sellers who are not bonded car dealers. Seeing as the significant amount of individuals selling their vehicles are not car dealers, LotBlok serves as the crucial bridge between these two parties.

Why do auction houses benefit?

Auction houses make their money on commissions from each auction held at their facility. These firms are more than comfortable taking on our consumer’s inventory as they are guaranteed to profit from every auction they host. Simply put, LotBlok opens an entirely new inventory channel for auction houses that has never been possible to date. As a result, partnered auction houses enjoy substantially more throughput and profit from our service.

Why do sellers benefit?

Our past customers have raved about the LotBlok platform as they can now handle the entire liquidation process from the comfort of their own home. There is no longer a need to drive your vehicle around town to get an appraisal or deal with sketchy Craigslist buyers. Best of all, sellers can rest assured that the price they get for their vehicle is the exact price that any other buyer would be able to get at an auction.

Every seller benefits from an industry standard liquidation process with checks being issued within 7 business days of the auction beginning. LotBlok’s facilitation team makes the entire transfer process intuitive and stress-free — eliminating any unnecessary work from the process. Once the auction is finalized, our team takes the vehicle off your hands within 24 hours.

Conclusion

LotBlok’s solution drastically improves the incumbent system of selling used vehicles. Car owners can now sell their vehicle stress-free while getting the best prices possible. Our platform is live and we are now processing vehicle transactions within the greater San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. If you’re interested in getting cash for your vehicle, feel free to begin the liquidation process here.

Next week, we will be outlining some of the details surrounding our blockchain solution built on Stellar and how blockchains facilitate the vehicle liquidation process like we’ve never seen before.

Stay up to date with our progress here!