First time buying from a dealer, what can i haggle them on (pic)?

It’s a leatherette portfolio for owners manual.

 

Alright, I'll give you my expert, GM of a dealership advice.
Dealerships have 3 pricing tiers, well 4 technically if you want to throw in an employee discount... or 5 if you're at a Ford dealership with their ABCXYZ plan pricing system..... or 6 if you want to throw in rebates... or 7 for corporate discounts...... we'll just stick with the 3 for simplicity of the conversation.

Dealerships have hold-back pricing, invoice pricing, and MSRP.

Hold-back pricing is what we would truly buy the vehicle for from the manufacturer. So if Ford sold us a new F150 Raptor at $63,580, that was our hold-back.

Invoice is typically a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars more than the hold-back, and that's truly the lowest we'd sell a vehicle for IF there were no other discounts applied (it's definitely possible to go below invoice or hold-back, but we'd only do that if the OEM or selling partner like TrueCar or Costco was making up the difference so it didn't impact our books). But even then, the only time we'd sell something at invoice is if we needed it off our lot to make room for the new model year. No matter how good you think your negotiating skills are, we'd never sell it at invoice unless we WANTED to. Dealerships are a business. And like all businesses, we are in it to make a profit. If we sold everything at or close to invoice, we'd never make enough money to even fill up our lots all the way. Yes.. it's true... dealerships make most of their money from the service department. But what a lot of people don't realize is the service department is it's OWN, separate operating income platform. So if they're making bank over there in service land, we can't take their profits and push it into the sales operating income to cover sales' expenses and costs, cause then it'd look like the service department isn't doing well when in fact, it's sales that wasn't doing well.

I'll tell you this, anything over MSRP is worth taking a second look at. Even when you've got a fully loaded vehicle with all the bells and whistles, it will have an MSRP cost and that's what we'd always put on our lots. There's sometimes extras we'd throw in for sure.. like tint, floor mats, bed mats, etc.. but those almost were always more expensive than what they are actually worth cause.. again.. we're a business and businesses always need to make a profit on what they are including/selling. You can easily get anything over MSRP discounted (or waived depending on the generosity of the sales manager, who takes into account overall sales growth and risks for the fiscal quarter), but getting MSRP discounted isn't as easy unless, again, we WANT to discount it below MSRP.

Typically, we'd only discount a maximum of 5% off MSRP if it's a normal, well-selling vehicle that hasn't been on the lot for more than 7 months, and would sell close to invoice or at invoice if it was the last model of the year on the lot and has been on the lot for at least a year.

Like others have mentioned though, dealerships are in it to win it, and are highly competitive against each other. Try your best with a dealer to get a good discount and see if someone else will beat it or at least throw in something the other dealer hasn't, like service or warranty plans on top. Just be careful not too haggle a dealership too much on lowering their prices, we'd have no problem turning someone away or holding our ground against someone who tried to "win" against us when we're already being generous.

 

I sold cars for a brief time in the early 2000's. I wasn't very successful, but I was educated beyond belief.
The best advice is to always buy on or within a day or 2 of the end of month. If you magically hit the end of quarter or year (you won't know what those are) you'll get the best deal due to manufacture spiffs for hitting a target. It is worth more for them to hit the number of cars sold per month/quarter/year target than to make a decent profit on your one vehicle.

 

too bad you can't get the SR with a 2.7 and 5 speed manual