Long story short, my car recently got wrecked and I'm currently in the market for a new one ASAP. Spending limit is ~$5000 and I live in the San Francisco bay area.
A couple of questions:
1) Is there anywhere I can look for used cars aside from Craigslist and dealerships? The chances of finding a car in my price range at a dealership don't seem very high (if I am incorrect about this please tell me) and Craigslist is okay but the large amount of spam and scams is starting to wear on me. I'll keep looking, but just wanted to know if there were alternatives.
2) This is just for a specific car, does anyone know about Ford Focuses and whether or not they are good cars/long lasting/etc? I'm asking because I don't know a whole lot about them but see a bunch pop up.
Posts
Autotrader is a thing.
Here are two that I know of in the Bay Area...
http://www.buggybank.com/default.php
http://www.parksellcars.com/inventory/
There are also some lower end used car lots down San Pablo Ave in El Cerrito that usually have a few offerings in the $5k range.
San Leandro/Hayward also has a similar strip of used car lots on East 14th/Mission Blvd.
Also, I got my last used car via a Korean Graduate Student message board for UC Berkeley. Fairly frequently there are postings there for people leaving the US after finishing grad school and selling their car for a very fair price, but you need to know someone that knows Korean. You might be able to find similar message boards for other Bay Area college communities (maybe Japanese or Chinese ones).
Just in case you can handle Korean...
http://www.kgsa.net/web/rent_sale
Plus there are a gajillion resources - cars.com, carmax.com, craigslist. Hit them all - see whats available, read through the consume report for ones that sound good, go test drive and then offer them at least 20% less than what they asked for.