How to sell your personalised number plate.

Having tired of your personalised number plate or maybe you just need to raise some cash, you are faced with a few optionss on how to go about selling it.

If you suspect that your number plates could be quite valuable you may be best obtaining an independent valuation from the Cherished Number Dealers Association before you start.

There is a charge for this but is your registration is worth thousands of pounds this charge will seem trivial.

Armed with this valuation you can take an informed view on the selling options available to you.

1.Sell to a dealer for cash.

This is the fastest option but will probably bring the least money.

The dealer has to add vat onto his selling price but if this price is not substantially lower than other similar numbers owned by non vat registered sellers he is unlikely to sell it.

He will also normally incur additional costs and transfer fees to place the number on one of his own vehicles or on a retention certificate in his name.

Keeping a number in stock is expensive as it ties up money that could otherwise be spent on advertising to generate sales and there are annual costs such as certificate renewal fees and tax and test for vehicles.

2.A no sale, no fee commission sale through a cherished number dealer.

This will return to you the maximum amount and shouldn’t cost you anything.

Between yourself and the dealer a figure is arrived at which you would find acceptable ( your CNDA valuation will pay for itself here ) , the delaer the adds his commission to this figure and the total is the advertised price.

When a sale is made the dealer would normally handle the transfer procedure and return to you the previously agrred figure.

3.Sell it yourself.

You could try advertising the registration number yourself but you will quickly find out advertising is very expensive , especially one single number.

You could try putting the number on ebay , this will cost you once again and remember that most people shopping on ebay are looking for a bargain so it might not reach your reserve price.

4.Sell it with the car.

If the reason you are selling your number is because you want to change cars you may be able to ask a premium on top of the cars asking price for the registration number.

This works well for inexpensive numbers or number plates which pertain to the car type or cover plates which hide the year of the car.

5. Internet number plate exchange sites.

These sites charge a one-off up front fee to list your registration number and it stays on untill sold.

They don’t handle the transfer for you if it sells.

You can test how effective this might be by searching on some of the search engines using phrases such as number plates or car registrations and see if the site you are considering appears in the results , if the site can’t be found it isn’t going to get a lot of visitors!Finally , if you have not had your number long and didn’t pay a lot for it , unless you are very shrewd or lucky it’s value probably hasn’t gone up much.

Some certainly have for example numbers for names such as JAN or LYN.

One tip is to search a few dealers websites for similar numbers and if they have lots available at low prices you could struggle to sell yours.