FOUR BUILDING SALES TRAPS

OUR PRACTICAL ADVICE HELPS YOU AVOID DECEPTIVE SALES PRACTICES

There are tons of claims in the metal building industry of sales, free freight, overrun or unclaimed steel buildings that typically are not true. This doesn’t mean you will necessarily receive a bad steel building but these are usually just deceptive sales practices that are unnecessary unless a company needs a gimmick to move their product. Something all customers would want to be aware of is if a company or sales person have to lie about how they move their metal building then what other lies are you about to encounter.

We list four of the most common lines you will hear.

The bottom line is if a company can’t give you a price on a steel building for sale and tell you how long the price is good for, chances are you are being pressured to make a decision that may not be wise.

#1 – OVERRUN OR UNCLAIMED STEEL BUILDINGS

Overrun or unclaimed buildings for sale are one of the biggest deceptive sales practices in the steel building industry and 99% of the time it is not true. You will have a sales person tell you that he happens to have a building close to the size you need. It just so happens, that it meets your local building codes (which is ridiculous because there are thousands of different codes and weather loads across the country), and several times you can still pick a color. The gimmick behind this is they want you to believe the steel building for sale was for example $20,000.00, and they are letting it go for $15,000.00 because the customer put down a partial deposit and had to walk away from it for some reason. Again this is to make you move quick without doing much shopping because they lead you to believe it is such a great deal that the building will be gone in the next 24 to 48 hrs. Don’t buy into it! Shop a little and you will discover you can buy the building for the same or better cost without the pressure.

#2 – 10-50% OFF SALE

Any “special sale” is nothing but a gimmick just like they do at a jewelry store in the mall. All any company is doing is showing a high resale price like a car dealership or jewelry store will do and they then say get 20% off that price. Once again if a customer checks prices he will typically see that a normal selling price from several other companies is the same, or a lot of times, less than the so called “sale price”. Once again this doesn’t mean you are getting a bad steel building for sale, but it is again a deceptive sales practice which should make you wonder.

#3 – FREE FREIGHT

Free freight is a way to mislead a customer into believing that if they order within a specific time frame (typically a day or two) the manufacturer of steel buildings for sale will deliver it to you for free. This is a type of pressure to get you to make a quick decision and take advantage of the free freight so the customer won’t shop pricing. What tends to happen 99 out of a 100 times is you can get the same deal from other suppliers for the same or less money and the freight is not free. Be aware that all they do is add the freight up front in the building cost and call it “free”. The selling price has the freight built in, but the line item on the contract for freight will say free or $0.00. Again free freight is a myth.

#4 – PRICES ARE GOING UP

“Buy now because prices are going up” is another common approach but it may not always be a gimmick. Steel is a commodity and there are times it can go up in price as much as a couple of times each month. This is a tough one to decipher because sometimes it is for real and other times it is not. You can always check the internet to see what steel prices are doing yourself. More often than not, however, this is another trick to get you to commit to a sale without doing much comparison shopping.