The out-of-state purchase
A truck in Phoenix. A buyer in Minneapolis. Nobody in the room who had seen it.
This is how a long-distance purchase usually goes, and it is the reason this page exists. It is a composite of the out-of-state deals we inspect, not one customer.
The listing
Four thousand dollars cheaper than anything at home
A clean 2019 pickup, 71,000 miles, photographed on a dealer lot in Phoenix. The paint is straight in every picture and the price sits well under anything within 500 miles of home. The truck is 1,600 miles away and it looks like the deal of the month.
The maths
Flying out to look at it costs more than the inspection
A flight, a rental, two days off work, and if the truck is wrong you fly home having spent all of it and bought nothing. So most buyers skip the trip and buy from photographs. That is the moment the risk gets taken, and it gets taken without anybody kneeling down and looking underneath.
The gap
What the photographs were never going to show
A seller photographs the vehicle, not the underside. Every listing has the same blind spot: the frame, the brake lines, the rear leaf springs, the differential, the subframe, the pinch welds, the inside of the bed. Rust and prior repair live there, and straight paint on top tells you nothing about any of it.
The inspection
An inspector stands in front of it the next day
You send us the listing. An inspector in Phoenix attends the vehicle, starts and runs the engine, works through the underside and every panel, photographs what is there, and writes it up. Within 24 hours you have the report, and you have it while the vehicle is still for sale.
The findings
Rear leaf springs heavily corroded, differential weeping, tyres at 4/32
Nothing on that list was visible in the listing photographs, and none of it was a deal breaker either. That is the point. An inspection is not there to kill the deal. It is there to tell you what you are actually buying, and what it will cost to put right.
The market check
And a look at whether this was even the right truck
RIZQ Market Check searches the country for the same make, model and year, and puts price, mileage and history side by side. On this one there were two comparable trucks within 300 miles of home at a similar price. That changed the question from is this cheap to is this actually better, and it was only worth shipping if the answer was yes.
The decision
Two thousand one hundred dollars came off the price
The report went to the selling dealer, who took $2,100 off rather than replace the springs and the tyres. That covered the enclosed transport and left the buyer ahead, with a written record of the condition of the vehicle on the day it was purchased.
The delivery
It arrived nine days later with no surprises
That is the whole point of doing this before the money moves. The vehicle that came off the transporter was the vehicle in the report, because somebody had stood next to it and looked.