SOLD (details and notes within)
The vehicle is now SOLD into British Columbia and is headed for Asia.
The sales process has been an interesting adventure. For those who later search this thread up and contemplate selling a similar vehicle, I'll leave a few notes here on my findings.
First, deciding to sell from the West Coast turned out to be a very good idea. Almost all continental prospects were from Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, and western Canada -- and there were approximately two dozen of these. There were no queries at all from the mid west or east coast save one query from Florida.
There were a surprising number of queries from Australia (nearly a dozen) and one couple from New Zealand actually visited. For all those, once they become convinced of the impracticality of converting this particular vehicle to Vario Pilot or right hand drive, the process would stop. There was also a sprinkling of queries from South America, India, Africa, and so on.
The best sources for leads were this forum, unimog.net, and unimogshop.com and in that order. I did also post at TruckPaper.com, RVTrader.com, etc, but those generated very few leads and the ones they did generate were very poorly qualified. As well, I identified those as the sources for a tremendous amount of call and e-mail spam I received for brokerage offers, financing offers, etc .. all for a fee, etc, of course.
In terms of the actual prospects who contacted either for long phone conversations or actual visits, I was amazed at the number of people who strongly asserted that they intended to buy the thing only to eventually fade away. I also learned to cringe when people would call and say right away that they had been looking for such a vehicle for many years and this one looked like *the* one. But the past is a great predictor of the future and so the strong odds are that someone who has been "looking for years" will, after much discussion, ultimately continue on forward in their eternal quest for theperfect vehicle.
As for vehicle features being pluses or minuses, I did very much lose a number of serious folks over the lack of a passthru. For us, this was never an issue and we enjoyed the fact that the camper was a sealed, dust-proof, standalone enclosure -- nevertheless, the market clearly wants a passthru on this sort of vehicle. An equivalent vehicle with passthru and vario pilot would have well within a couple months. On the other side, the lack of an air conditioner and built-in generator (both of which I had removed from the original vehicle) were never an issue with any serious prospect.
In all, the vehicle was on the market for almost 5 months. If anyone now or in the future would like more details about lessons learned, etc, feel free to PM me and we can talk.
All the best, David
p.s. props to GXV for providing diligent support to all my serious prospects and especially the eventual buyer.
