When we launched the Simply Registrations website, the aim was to attract more potential customers. Little did we know that the website would attract far more enquiries from individuals wanting to sell their private number plates to us, rather than the other way round.
One of the main contributing factors to this is the DVLA Personalised Registrations scheme. With the new car comes the optional extras, £600 for air conditioning, £1000 for alloy wheels and £250 for an off-the-shelf registration direct from DVLA.
The £250 number plate is great and in a few years time when the owner of the car decides to start looking for a newer model, there is a decision to be made. Should the owner transfer the £250 number plate to his or her new car, or just let it stay with the car when it is traded in?
Quite often the number plate stays with the car and somebody somewhere buys a car with a personalised number plate that has no real relevance to them. The car’s new owner, Lucy in this example, happens to mention to a bloke in the pub that her new car came complete with the personalised registration N66 AKB.
“That’s got to be worth a few hundred quid” the bloke in the pub informs Lucy. “In fact, I bet it’s worth at least a grand ’cause it will have gone up in value”.
Lucy is over the moon. She thinks she has a number plate worth £1,000 and the next day she rings round a few number plate dealers eager to cash in on her new found treasure.
Lucy finds out that her ‘valuable’ number plate is not worth £1,000 after all. It is not nice giving someone disappointing news, especially after their hopes have been built up. Quite often the person on the other end of the telephone has already decided how they are going to spend their unexpected windfall.
Generally there are lots of similar registrations still available from DVLA for £250. Indeed there are still twenty-four similar ‘N’ prefix registrations followed by the letters AKB. If you consider the other prefix letters, there are four-hundred and seventy-five AKB registrations still available from the DVLA at the time of writing.
Very seldom will the number plate be worth a huge amount when it has been left on the car by the previous owner. It costs £80 to transfer a number plate from one vehicle to another. If the number plate really was worth £1,000 the previous owner would have paid £80 to hang on to their investment. The general rules is, if the number plate came with the car, it is probably worth no more today than it was on the day it was bought.
As with all rules however, there are exceptions. If your car came with a number plate and it seems all of the similar combinations are no longer available from the DVLA you may be in luck. Pick up the telephone and call a few number plate dealers. It could be worth a few hundred quid!
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