Consumerist Research Team Assemble: LowerMyLease.com

By consumerist.com December 19, 2005

The gauntlet has been thrown, our thrifty friends. Jeff Jarvis writes:

My father got a pitch from LowerMyLease.com, owned by ACS, which promises to lower his car least by almost half. I can
t find the trick. The means either that the GMAC lease he has is so stuffed with margin that it
s easy for another company to come along and do this
or that there
s a trick or hidden fee here I can
t find. Any wiser minds than mine able to figure this out? Is this a case for Consumerist?

We’re already digging, but feel free to chime in with your wisdom.

Update: Upon initial review, it seems like a pretty basic refinancing deal. LowerMyLease pays the lease buy-out, the refinances a new (now, ‘used car’) lease with a different lender, presumably taking advantage of the savings allowed by a buyout of the initial lease. Since the company that holds you lease actually owns the car, ACS buys the car outright, getting a discount from the original lease holder. They then make their money by charging you a payment and holding the title of the car itself. We were able to confirm this with ACS.

They only refinance newer leases, because the pay-off from the original lease holder is much more advantageous to them. There may be limitations to end-of-lease options compared to a ‘standard’ lease, like charging an premium buy-out rate to guarantee they maintain ownership of the vehicle.

So while we can’t vouch for the company, obviously, we’re leaning toward ‘GMAC has a crazy high margin,’ since his car was sold by GM directly to GMAC for the lease.

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Comments

  1. John says:
    November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am

    The Devil’s in the details. Until you see the lease agreement and go over it with a fine tooth comb, I wouldn’t sign up for this at all. I tried to sell a car I owned after owning it for abou 18 months. Needless to say it wasn’t paid off. I kept getting offers from people to buy it but they weren’t actually going to be the title holder…It would still be in my name. I passed on that noise.

    Have a lawyer review this. Sounds shaky.

  2. LowerMyLease says:
    November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am

    This is a new service we created from the number of re-leases we were doing through our http://www.LeaseCompare.com website. There is no guarantee that we can lower your lease payment but it doesn’t hurt to try.

    Leases are re-written with national lenders such as US Bank and Wells Fargo and are standard Regulation M contracts.