A popular Japanese hatchback, eleven years old, one owner, genuinely low mileage, tidy inside and beautifully clean. The sort of car that sells itself in an afternoon.
We put it on the lift and it changed the price by twenty seven thousand rufiyaa.
Underneath, two things. The rear suspension mounts had the beginnings of proper corrosion, not surface rust, and one brake pipe was pitted along a run where a plastic shield had been missing for years. Neither was dangerous that week. Both were the start of a conversation the next owner would be having within three years, and the brake pipe was a job worth doing immediately rather than eventually.
We replaced the pipe and the shield, treated the mounts properly, and wrote all of it on an inspection sheet which we taped inside the windscreen with the photographs of the underside attached. Then we priced it at 168,000 instead of the 195,000 we had been planning.
Two people walked away because of the sheet, which is fine. The third read it, went and looked underneath himself with a torch, and bought it that afternoon. He said it was the first time a showroom here had shown him a photograph of the part of a car nobody photographs.
The lesson we have taken from doing this for twelve years is that salt does not damage cars where buyers look. Everybody inspects paint, seats and the air conditioning. Almost nobody inspects subframes, suspension mounts, brake pipes and the boot floor, and those are exactly where a car in this country is quietly consumed.
So every car on our floor goes on the lift, every underside gets photographed, and the sheet goes in the windscreen whether it flatters the car or not.