Should I get a car detailed before selling it?

[Joshua.Snider]

I have a used car that I'm trying to sell. It's a 2005 Mazda 3 with ~200k miles on it. KBB says it would be worth between $1,800 and $3,000 depending on condition and is probably closer to the low end of that range. My current plan to sell it is to just drive it to a local CarMax over the weekend and take whatever they offer. Family members are suggesting that I get it detailed on the premise that I will get the $50-$300 I spend on that back when I sell it. What do you guys think?

[ZiziPB]

You will get a better price if the car is clean. But why couldn't you do it yourself???  Spend $10 if you need to get some products. Elbow grease doesn't cost anything.

[MsPeacock]

Just do it yourself or take it to the $15 carwash. Absolutely not reason to spend hundreds having it detailed.

[apennysaved]

We used the elbow grease method and detailed our own cars before selling them.   I seriously used some wet Q-tips to get some gunk out of the little nooks & crannies, and the cars looked professionally cleaned when we were finished.  Probably took my husband and I less than an hour to clean a car.

[Joshua.Snider]

Update: I ended up just borrowing my roommates vacuum and then going to a car wash, but still have the car since CarMax offered me much less than I was expecting. I'm not sure what the current plan with it is.

[gimp]

Yes, definitely detail it. I would do a combination of cash wash + about $20-30 in detailing things (leather thing, tire thing, vacuum to spotless, whatever).

Also, if you can take photos of the car that aren't fucking retarded, you will get much more interest when you sell on craigslist or whatever. I see so many cars for sale that have no photos, or just one or two photos (we all know what the car looks like from the back and side), or photos in terrible lighting, photos with terrible angles, photos that look like they were taken with a flip phone with vaseline on the lens, photos of just close-ups of things that don't matter (and you don't know what the closeups are of because there's no description), and so on and so on.