When Hollywood scriptwriter Scott Nimerfro needed a car to bridge stints between his job in Los Angeles and his home in Cottage Grove, he didn’t bother cruising car lots. Instead, he went to LeaseTrader.com and took over the remaining lease on a 2008 BMW from a total stranger.
The short two-year lease gave him the snazzy car he craved without a long term financial commitment.
As the recession stubbornly digs in, Nimerfro is on the cusp of a rising trend. The trading of car leases is growing in popularity as more lease holders opt to exit contracts because of job losses, salary cuts and general cost cutting, say online service firms such as LeaseTrader.com and swapalease.com, which match trading partners on the Internet for a fee.
“In the fourth quarter of 2007, the No. 1 reason people were getting out of a car lease is because of a mortgage situation. Today, the No. 1 reason is because of job loss,” said John Sternal, marketing vice president for the Miami-based LeaseTrader.com.
With the nation’s unemployment rate spiraling to 8.1 percent and monthly lease payments averaging $620 last year and $570 this year on mostly luxury cars, people are gunning for relief.
“We have found that most of the people who are swapping auto leases would prefer not to,” Spinella said. Yet lease swapping “has doubled and the people who use [an online service] for the most part are pretty happy with it. It’s easier to find. Four years ago, it was impossible to find them.”
LeaseTrader spokesman Evan Sneider said, “We did 20,000 transactions nationwide in 2006, 35,000 in 2007 and we exceeded 45,000 in 2008. This year we are tracking to be above where we were last year.”
LeaseTraders’s online lease postings jumped about 30 percent last year nationwide. Minnesota saw “a 38 percent increase compared to a year ago,” Sneider said.
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