Damerow Beaverton Ford - Thomason
Poor Business Practices, very nearly a Bait and Switch scam

This started when I received an email spam about a "great car" deal going on at Beaverton Damerow, only in the Internet Department. My interest was piqued, so I decided to go to the dealer website to browse inventory. I couldn't find the site, so I used Google. The first site to come up for Damerow Ford was an article on this website.

I replied to the dealer email, showing them the article I had found, and asked them to speak to it. I also mentioned that I had already been to three dealers and none would offer me more than $5500 for my trade in, and I was not interested in playing around anymore. The sender did reply, and thanked me for alerting him to the article. He also wrote that he wanted to see if he could help me trade in my car for a new Ford.

We went through the process of my giving him data about my car, and he came back with an offer of $8175.00 for my trade in, a $2000 rebate on the sale of a new vehicle, and $400 to $600 below dealer invoice. I was pretty excited with this offer, and made an appt to come down to the lot.

We got there, test drove a new Ford Escape and settled in to discuss price. Right away, I am told that they cannot do the $8175.00 they had promised for my trade in. I was upset, and began to feel a little bit mislead. Still, we continued on with the price discussion. After going back and forth a bit, he came up with $6000 for my trade in, and the Oregonian Ad price for the Escape I wanted to purchase (about $3000 off). Since my fiance and I had not had a chance to discuss this with each other, we decided to go to lunch and we said we would call him to let him know our descision. The salesperson printed out a physical copy of the offer for us to take with us.

At lunch, we talked and decided to take the offer. We called and then went back to Damerow to began the long process of filling out all the identification paperwork. When that was finished, we waited another half hour to speak with the Financial person, and to sign the final paperwork.

We began signing, and about the fifth piece of paper we were to sign was a statement of the trade in price that we were agreeing to. My fiance noticed that this now read $5200. We asked what this was about, and we were told that this was the highest that their appraiser would let them go on my trade in. We were appalled. We showed the Financial person the printed out copy of the offer we had agreed to take. He called the salesguy to find out what was going on. The salesguy came down and told us, again, that this was the highest they were going to go on the trade in. We asked him how the price had changed (without any consultation with us) between lunch and now. He said that the $6000 was only what he had "hoped" to get us, and had not really been a promise of anything. We waved the printed copy of the offer in front of him and told him that there was nothing on this paper that stated the offer was just a "possible" price.

The Financial person then began taunting us with comments like "If the $6000 was such a great deal, why did you have to wait until after lunch to take it?" and hinting that we were making too big a deal out of this $800 difference. We finally got up and left, but not before I made my fiance go back and see all the copies of anything I had signed so far, torn up by the Financial person.

We feel that this constant price swapping was a blatent attempt to (1) get us on the lot, and then (2) to see if we would just go with it after having test drove and waited all that time. (5 hours wasted at that lot!) We also think that they may have hoped we just would not read the fine print on what we were signing. We think they probably get away with this a lot as most people probably do not read their paperwork very closely with the excitement of getting a new car.

We will never step foot on Damerow again. We may even be soured from Ford after this. We recommend that everyone stay far, far away from this Dealer. If you do go in, make sure you read every little bit of fine print because they do change the prices on you after you have verbally agreed to purchase.

Company: Damerow Beaverton Ford - Thomason
Country: USA
State: Oregon
City: Beaverton
Address: 12325 Sw Canyon Road
Phone: 5036441131

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