Watch Out for the Inevitable Flood Damaged Cars Coming Into the Used Car Market!

You can be sure that tens of thousands of flood damaged vehicles will indeed start showing up on used car lots across the country. Many of the car dealers won't even know that they have flood damaged cars in their inventory.

In spite of the efforts of law enforcement and insurance officials many of these cars will be purchased through salvage auctions, and some shady characters in the car business will take advantage of certain state's laws to end up with a "clean" title. There will be no indication on the titles that these cars were flood damaged, even though many states (but not all - that's the key) require such vehicles to reflect either "salvaged" or "flood damaged" on the title.

A group of insurance investigators and Louisiana law enforcement officials are building a data base of these flood damaged vehicles. So far they have over 205,000 vehicles listed. You can access the data base at http://www.nicb.org

If you're looking to buy a used car read Tips For Spotting Flood-Damaged Vehicles and be sure to get a Carfax report.

The fact is that this is an ongoing problem with or without the recent hurricanes. There are always some flood damaged and salvaged vehicles that make it back into the marketplace. Use your head and always get a Carfax report. Always!

Tony Iorio