By Ramesh Mathew/Staff Reporter


Vehicles with “for sale” notices parked on Doha’s roadsides. PICTURES: Shemeer Rasheed

At a time when many of the country’s residents, mostly expatriates, are away on summer vacation, and parking lots are easily available near shopping malls, second-hand car sellers and buyers are having a good time.
Gulf Times’s inquiries found car owners using the parking lots of shopping complexes to sell their cars with mobile numbers pasted on the windows.
Calls to some of the potential sellers found that the cars belonged mostly to rent-a-car firms.
When asked why vehicles were parked there for long hours, one of the sellers said it would attract people visiting the shopping centres, especially after the evening prayers.
“While I had been trying all along for about a month to buy a car within my budget, it took me only a couple of hours the other day to arrive at a decision on seeing three such cars parked on the grounds of a shopping centre,” said an expatriate who had been hunting for a second-hand Toyota Camry.
Sources in the second-hand car business said other than advertising through such usual channels such as newspaper ads, social network sites and buy-and-sell cars websites people are also exploring such methods as talking directly to the owners of such cars “parked for sale” at shopping centres’ areas.
“The biggest advantage of such sale is the possibility of seeing the cars concerned in the first place and also obviously the chances of meeting their owners directly,” said the friend who succeeded making a deal at the parking lot of a shopping centre.
Sometimes users of old cars also employ such tactics as driving very slowly through the city areas, (of course with stickers pasted on the windows) and getting deliberately caught in the middle of traffic jams in order to receive attention from potential customers.
A second-hand car seller said one of the main drawbacks of the deal taking place at the shopping centre grounds is the risk of being fooled by dubious agents, who pose themselves as owners. Once a sale takes place, such people are nowhere to be seen, he said. But if one buys the vehicle from somebody having an office, there is more reliability, he argued.
Visits to some other locations in the city found that users of old cars also make use of open spaces at intersections in order to attract attention from the passersby.