Why vans deserve their own auction, and what we are building
Vans are bought, sold and valued differently from cars, yet they are traded through auctions built for cars. We are building a dedicated van auction, and here is the reasoning behind it.
We already run two national vehicle buying services, Sell Any Vans and Sell Any Trucks. We built them, we run their search and paid campaigns, and we live with the cost per lead every month. Doing that for a couple of years teaches you where the market is inefficient, and one gap kept showing up.
Vans are traded through auctions designed for cars.
A van is not a small car
The differences are not cosmetic. They change what a buyer needs to see before bidding:
- Condition that matters is different. Load area wear, bulkhead, ply lining, roof damage and tow bar condition barely feature in a car listing
- Specification is functional rather than trim-based: wheelbase, roof height, payload, panel or crew, tail lift, racking
- Mileage means something different on a vehicle that has worked for its living
- Buyers are overwhelmingly trade, and they are buying to a job rather than to a taste
- Fleet disposals arrive in batches with shared history, which a car-shaped listing flow handles badly
Put a van through a listing template built for cars and most of what a trade buyer needs is either missing or buried in free text. The result is cautious bidding, and cautious bidding costs the seller.
What we are building
A dedicated van auction: listings structured around how vans are actually specified, condition reporting built for a load area, and bidding designed for trade buyers rather than retail browsers.
We are building it for ourselves first, which is how we prefer to work. Sell Any Vans already sees the supply side of this market every day, so we are not guessing at what sellers have or what buyers ask for.
The engineering is the part we are least worried about. Real-time bidding, timed lots, proxy bids, reserve handling and settlement are well-understood problems. The difficult parts are the ones nobody sees: condition reporting that is honest enough for a buyer to bid on without an inspection, and dispute handling for when it turns out not to have been.
Where it is up to
In build. We will publish more as it comes together, including the parts that do not work first time, because those are usually the useful ones to read about.
If you operate a fleet, a dealership or a disposal programme and this is a problem you recognise, we would like to hear how you currently handle it.