PEPPER PIKE, Ohio — There’s a new website dedicated to solving a specific problem for car enthusiasts — the often annoying process of buying and selling vehicles online.
Drivedowncars.com, a sort of boutique website for car enthusiasts, aims to simplify things. Instead of haggling over prices or placing bids in a live auction, vehicles are listed and drop in price each day for a week until they’re sold.
Mitch Scher is a dentist who lives in Pepper Pike and has a practice in Mayfield Heights. But his hobby is buying and selling vehicles. Every time he listed a car on Facebook Marketplace, he’d get the same results.
About 50 people would message him and ask, “Is this still available?” Scher would respond “yes.” Only half would reply, and the ones who did would send low-ball offers.
“I was trying to work on patients and live my life,” Scher said. “But I was spending so much time negotiating with these people and just wasting my time.”
He had the same problem buying cars. At online auctions, people would wait until the last minute to place a bid. But because websites didn’t want auction sniping — which is when someone waits until the last second to place the highest bid — they’d add time for each bid.
Scher said that meant wasting more time, because he’d have to sit and wait for the auctions to be over.
That’s why he and his co-founder Taylor Davis, started Drive Down. Here’s how it works.
DriveDown's goal is to take the annoying parts out of the vehicle-buying process for car enthusiasts.Courtesy of DriveDown
Sellers will list a vehicle on the website for seven days. There’s no negotiating, but each day the price will come down by a set amount.
A buyer can decide that the vehicle is worth it, or they can wait for day two, three, etc. But instead of actually waiting they can place a proxy offer at a lower price.
If the sale price drops below their proxy offer, they win the auction. But someone can buy it before them at a higher price.
Scher said this solves two issues. There’s no dealing with low-ball offers and potential buyers that ghost you, like on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist. And buyers don’t have to sit and babysit auctions. They can place a proxy offer or just buy it instantly.
Sellers can use the service for free. They submit their vehicle and photos and their reserve price (the lowest amount they’ll sell for). If DriveDown accepts it, the company handles the listing, promotion and sets the prices each day based on market value.
Buyers pay a 5% fee if they win the auction. That means a $1,000 fee for a $20,000 car.
Scher said the website is a boutique service, and the plan isn’t to be selling hundreds of vehicles each week. He said the goal is to eventually list five vehicles a day.
This isn’t the kind of website where you’d buy a Toyota Camry or Honda Civic. Scher said DriveDown is for car enthusiasts and unique vehicles.
“It could be $15,000, it could $200,000,” Scher said. “It just has to be something special.”
So far DriveDown has sold two vehicles, has two that it’s currently listing and three that are “coming soon.”
While these vehicles have all been from Northeast Ohio, he said the website will sell vehicles from all 50 states.
Right now, DriveDown has a four-person staff, Scher said. Davis, his cofounder, is the president of Davis Automotive Group, which owns the Jaguar & Land Rover and BMW Cleveland, both in Solon.
Sean McDonnell covers business and consumer topics for cleveland.com. You can reach him at smcdonnell@cleveland.com You can read more Cleveland business stories at cleveland.com/business/.