OT: leasetrade vs. swapalease

Totally Off Topic. Apologies. I'm thinking about letting go of my Audi. Since it was leased, I'm considering putting it on one of those lease takeover sites. Does anyone have experience with either leasetrade or swapalease? Which one should I go for?

I leased my first Porsche, and used Swapalease. Worked out really well for me. I was able to get out of my lease a year early and buy my 04. Offer incentives to take the car... such as paying one month + cash if the car is going out of warranty. I did have one big problem, however, it had nothing to do with swapalease. I had my lease through Chase and it was a friggin NIGHTMARE. They are the slowest people on the face of the earth... I lost about 2+ months just dealing with the paperwork. YMMV. Rob

if you use these lease trade, does the leasee change to the new owner or is your credit still on the hook. what i mean is if the new owner fails to pay, whose credit reputation gets dinged?

Good point. I need to do some more homework... I was told by someone in AW A4 forum (shameless double posting) that with Audi Financials original leasee is still on the hook along with new leasee. So, in that case, the new leasee has incentive not to ruin his credit, but there still is risk something unexpected can happen. I need to verify this with Audi Financials.

We are looking to get out of our 2002 S60 T-5 Volvo lease as we have about 15 months left. Our car is leased through Wells Fargo and from what I have been told, this is the only leasing company that will transfer liability along with the lease itself. Who knows at this point. Would like to hear what others have done in terms of getting out of leases early, using lease trading/selling services. How do these lease trading places make their money?

I used leasetrader.com and was not very happy with them and got very limited responses (despite offering a high cash incentive); my impression is that swapalease has a wider following. Whether you are off the hook or not depends on the particular leasing company. Chase does let you off the hook, but like Rob stated, Chase was a complete nightmare to deal with and took forever to complete a simple transaction. I think the main reason to try to transfer a lease is when the ending residual is substantially more than the likely ending market value - then you have to ride out the lease til the end of the term so you can give the undervalued car back to the leasing company. Otherwise, I would never try to transfer a lease again - just too much hassle finding someone and dealing with the leasing company.

That's untrue. I'm completely out of my lease with Chase. The new leassor has all the rights and responsibilies for the car and the payments. Should he choose never to pay the lease, they would go after him, I'm not even in the system anymore. I called Chase shortly after the deal was done to make sure it went through OK, and they couldn't even find a record of me in the system. I had to get the new owner to call and check it out.

Rob: I think you misunderstood - I did say Chase lets the original lessee completely off the hook and clearly they do. Whether other leasing companies do depends on their respective policies.

My bad I misread it, sorry about that!!

As a data point, I spoke with Wells Fargo Auto Leasing today about getting out of our Volvo lease, the agent said its not that hard. He sends a lease transfer packet, prospective buyer fills out the credit application and it takes about 15 working days to approve, transfer etc. Best part is, no liability on my part afterwards. Cool!

Chris - sounds like Wells Fargo has their act together. To expand on my and Rob's comments, Chase is completely and totally inept - it took close to three months from the time I found a highly qualified transferee to work everything out with Chase (and that was with constantly overnighting everything and pushing them constantly), and even after all that, they still screwed up the credit reporting. I think Rob (riad) experienced the same thing. Anyone with Chase should be forewarned that its going to take months to complete a transfer.

The New York Times had an article on this in October. Here's a link to it. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstrac...archive:search AUTOS ON MONDAY/Buying and Leasing; Assuming Someone Else's Lease: Point, Click, Wait By PATRICK MCGEEHAN (NYT) 1414 words Late Edition - Final , Section D , Page 12 , Column 1 DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 1414 WORDS - ''ANTICIPATION, anticipa-a-tion.'' If you can remember how you felt while watching the classic Heinz ad set to the Carly Simon song -- would the ketchup ever come out of the bottle? -- you have a head start on deciding whether to try taking over a car lease using the Internet....