Why October Is the Best Month to Buy a Motorcycle

We wrote a while back about when to sell a bike, and the short version was: spring, obviously, because that is when everybody wants one.

Turn that around and you have the buyer’s version of the same argument. If the best time to sell is when demand is high, the best time to buy is when it is not. In this country that means October and November, and the gap between the two ends of the year is bigger than most people assume.

What actually happens to prices

The used market runs on a fairly predictable cycle. It wakes up in late February, peaks somewhere in April and May, holds through the summer, and then falls off a cliff at the end of September.

By the time you get to the second half of October, three things have happened at once.

Private sellers who listed in August and have not shifted the bike are now looking at four months of paying insurance on something sitting under a cover. They get realistic quickly.

Dealers are looking at stock that has been on the forecourt since summer and working out what it costs to still be looking at it in February. Every bike on a forecourt is money that is not doing anything.

And the September plate change has done its work. New registrations in September mean part-exchanges, and those part-exchanges wash through the trade over the following six to eight weeks. That is a wave of decent, ordinary used bikes landing exactly when the number of people shopping for one has collapsed.

The result is that the same bike, in the same condition, will commonly carry a few hundred pounds less in November than it will in March. On a middleweight it can be more than that.

The honest counter argument

There is a cost to buying in October and it would be dishonest not to put it up front.

You are going to insure and tax a bike you will ride less over the winter. If you are a fair weather rider and the thing sits in the garage until March, you have paid four or five months of standing costs to save three or four hundred quid. Depending on your premium, that is roughly a wash.

Two things tip it back in your favour.

The first is that you get the winter to sort it out. New tyres, a service, whatever the seller did not do, all done at a workshop’s quiet time of year rather than in the April rush when everyone in Hampshire wants their bike back by the weekend. You start the season on a bike you actually know.

The second is choice. In March you are competing with every other buyer for whatever happens to be listed that week, and you end up compromising on colour, mileage or spec because you want to be riding. In November you can wait for the right one. Nobody is going to beat you to it.

What the cold hides, and how to look past it

Inspecting a bike in October is harder than inspecting one in June, and sellers know it. Some of them are counting on it.

A cold engine tells you more than a warm one. Turn up and find the bike already running and idling nicely, and you have been denied the single most informative thirty seconds of the viewing. A tired battery, a starting fault, a bike that smokes on the first fire of the day: all of it hides behind a seller who warmed it up before you arrived. Ask them not to. If it was already running when you got there, come back another day.

Wet paint flatters. Rain fills in swirl marks, hides dull lacquer and makes everything look freshly detailed. Take a torch, and look at panels from a low angle rather than straight on.

Wet also hides drips. You cannot tell a fork seal weep or a light oil leak from road spray on a soaked bike. Get underneath it with the torch and look at the actual surfaces, not the drips on the floor.

Cold makes everything feel notchy. A gearbox that is stiff on a five degree morning is not necessarily a gearbox with a problem. Ride it far enough to get some heat into it before you form a view.

Check the tyre dates, not just the depth. A bike that has spent a couple of winters standing will have plenty of tread and tyres that have gone hard and square across the middle. The four digit code on the sidewall gives you the week and year they were made. Anything more than five or six years old wants replacing regardless of how it looks, and that is a couple of hundred pounds you can argue with.

And go and look at it in daylight. Evening viewings in November are how people end up buying a bike they have never actually seen.

The MOT question

This one is worth real money and almost nobody thinks about it.

A bike bought in October with an MOT that runs out in April has, in practical terms, no MOT. You will be paying for one before you have ridden it properly, and if something fails you are into the bill at the worst possible time.

A bike with an MOT that runs to next October is worth meaningfully more to you. It has been through a test recently, you know roughly what state the consumables were in when it did, and you have a full riding season before you have to think about it again.

Ask when the last test was and pull the history up. The MOT record is free and public, and it will show you the mileage at every test going back years, which is the simplest lie detector there is on a used bike. A machine that covered 4,000 miles a year for a decade and then apparently did 300 last year is a machine that has been sitting, and sitting causes its own problems.

Where dealers fit in

We are a dealer, so read this with that in mind, but it is true regardless.

Q4 is when dealers deal. Nobody wants to carry stock through to spring, and a bike that has been on the forecourt since August is costing money every week it stays there. That is the point at which there is genuinely room to talk, in a way there simply is not in April when three other people have asked about the same bike that week.

What you get for the difference in price against a private sale is the boring stuff that matters in winter: the bike has been checked over, the paperwork is right, there is somebody to ring if something is wrong in a fortnight, and you are not standing in a stranger’s driveway in the dark trying to work out whether the frame has been straightened.

If you are weighing that up, our guide on five things to check before buying a used motorcycle covers what to look for either way.

So, is it worth it

If you ride year round, buying in autumn is straightforwardly the right call and there is not much to debate.

If you are a spring to autumn rider, it comes down to whether the saving beats the standing costs, and whether having the winter to get the bike properly sorted is worth something to you. For most people who intend to keep the bike more than a season, it is.

What you should not do is what most people do, which is decide in the first warm week of March, join the queue, and pay the top of the market for whatever is left.

Have a look at what we have in stock. If nothing there is right, tell us what you are after and we will keep an eye out. We see a lot of bikes come through in the autumn, and plenty of them never make it as far as the website.