It's the end of December in Michigan so if your craigslist pics look like this:
...they obviously weren't taken recently. I've noticed this enough that now I'm curious. To me, it gives a sketchy vibe to the whole ad.
Edit: the weird thing is, in this case, the rest of the ad seems legit, even invites contact via text or call at a local number.
If it sounds too good to be true....
But, yeah, that should be a warning bell. See also: They say the car's in Michigan, but the photos were obviously taken in Miami.
In that case the car may have been for sale for months OR they just had those pics in their camera roll
In reply to chandler :
That's my thought. If I put an ad in, and the car still looks the same, I'll use a existing picture. But then I don't have to worry about white stuff giving me away!
I've used old pictures before because I thought they did a good job depicting a certain aspect of a car. For example, I had detailed suspension pictures of a solid axle swapped Montero that were 2 or 3 months old, but I thought they were great pictures.
Can also be a case of a car that's stored in winter, and the owner doesn't want to pull it out in the snow just to take pictures.
Just thinking about some legit reasons:
- Could be a case of laziness, or just a rush to list it without wanting to wait to take new photos
- It might be dark when they leave for work and dark when they get (the sun does set early this time of year) and they didn't want to wait for the weekend.
- grey winter light makes things look dull and dirty, not ideal for an ad
I'm car shopping right now. The years/models I'm looking at have, on average, been listed 146 days. That could 'splain the old pics
One of my pet peeves are ads that say "hardtop/wheels/suspension/etc in pictures does not come with car." Worse are the ones saying "I fixed that dent since the pictures were taken." Worst are the ads with each picture showing the car on different wheels, different colo body panels, or what it looked like before the seller put it in a garage and took it half apart before losing interest in the thing, etc.
My standard response: take pictures right now showing what the car will look like if someone was coming this afternoon to pick it up. Anything less and you're not really trying to sell a car.
There's also the ads that show an identical picture from another ad with a different seller in a different state.
I've used image search and found this a bunch of times when seeing an ad with a highly desirable car at an unbelievably low price.
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