Selling a car here, question by question

Yes, English all the way through. The site, the offer email, the messages and the phone call, and the person who turns up to collect the car. Dutch terms like tenaamstellingscode and vrijwaringsbewijs get explained the first time they appear, because nobody arrives in this country already knowing them.

Two things. Your number plate, the kenteken, and the mileage. From the plate alone the Dutch vehicle register gives us the make, model, year and fuel. Photographs help and are not required at this stage. Documents belong to the handover and are nothing to think about yet.

No. The offer is free, there is no fee taken out of it later, and nothing is binding on you until you accept it.

The request is short, because the plate does most of the filling in. How quickly an offer comes back depends on how much detail came with it, so a request with photographs is answered sooner than one without. After you accept, the handover date is yours to name.

Check it for a typo first. A zero and the letter O, a one and the letter I, these get mixed up constantly. If it still will not come up, the car may be on a foreign registration or may already have been exported. Fill in the details by hand, or send us a message and we will work it out with you.

Both, and neither is unusual. Give us the exact reading or describe what the damage is, add a photograph if there is something to see, and it is built into the offer from the start.

Yes. The APK is the Dutch roadworthiness test and it does not need to be valid for us to buy the car. Tell us when it expired, or what the garage listed if it failed. A car without a valid APK may not be driven on public roads, so we collect it on a transporter.

Say so in the request. It changes what the car is worth and not whether we want it. We then arrange a collection in which the car never has to move under its own power, which is an ordinary day for us.

No, and we would honestly prefer you did not. A repair done to lift a sale price hardly ever earns back what it costs. We price the car in the state it is in. A quick hoover is welcome and nobody is counting on it.

Four things. The registration card, the kentekencard. Both halves of the registration code, the tenaamstellingscode, which arrives with the card or separately by post. A valid passport or ID card. And every key that belongs to the car. If it is still on the old paper registration from before 2014, bring that in place of the card. The RDW transfer is our job, and the vrijwaringsbewijs is in your hand before we leave.

You name the time and the place. We go over the car together against what you described, transfer it out of your name at the RDW while standing there, and pay you before it is loaded or driven off. The vrijwaringsbewijs stays with you as proof the car is no longer yours.

Yes, at no cost, anywhere in the country, villages included. Tell us the address, whether the car drives, and whether there is a gate, a barrier or a height limit between it and the road.

Not on your own. The transfer runs on the registered owner's registration code and their ID, so that person has to be part of it. If the car belongs to a lease company or to your employer, the sale has to go through them.

Every Dutch vehicle sits in the RDW's register against a person or a company. The transfer, the tenaamstelling, moves it from you to us. Until that has happened the road tax, any fines and the liability are all still yours, whoever happens to be driving.

It is the receipt proving the car has left the register under your name, printed at the moment the transfer goes through. Keep it somewhere safe. Your responsibility for the car, road tax and fines included, ends at the date and time shown on it. The road tax, the motorrijtuigenbelasting, stops by itself, and the Belastingdienst, the Dutch tax authority, repays what you had paid in advance. Tell your insurer too, so the policy closes with it.

Before you deregister at the gemeente, your municipality, if the dates allow it. Selling while you still hold a Dutch address keeps the whole thing simple, and it stops the road tax and the insurance running on a car you have already finished with.

An email arrives with a link to a page belonging to your request. The amount is on it, along with buttons to accept, to decline, or to come back with a figure of your own. Nothing expires and nothing commits you.

Three inputs. What the register already holds about the car, what you tell us about its condition, and what that model is doing on the Dutch market at the moment. Photographs sharpen all three, because they show us your car and not the average one.

There is no expiry date on it. It stays on your offer page, unchanged, until you accept it, decline it, or we come back with a revision. Go quiet and you get one reminder email. Only the one.

Tell us, and put your own figure on the offer page. We look at it again properly and come back with a yes or a no, and the reason behind whichever it is.

At the handover, once the car has been checked and moved out of your name at the RDW. Nothing is held back and there is nothing to wait for afterwards.