Its been difficult for the last couple of years with the economic downturn as you'd expect, middle of the year is usually the most ideal time to try and sell, as usually people have more money, October-December peopel are thinking about christmas, January - March people are paying off Christmas etc. So you could say its a buyers market around christmas as dealers are desperate to shift cars but on the whole theres no real bad time to try and sell as there will always be buyers out there if the car is a good one. If its a popular car like a Focus, well maintained etc it'll find a local buyer quite easily, something more specialist or nieche and you may have to wait longer regardless of time of year.

What i have observed though, is theres probably more cars for sale on things like Auto Trader per week than in previous years. In 2006 there was usually like 330,000 nationally, on average for sale on most weeks, last week it was over 400,000, presumably with money now tight alot of people are selling their cars, or selling their second cars etc. So theres competition.

In many ways its competition the market needs since the Government took 200,000 perfectly drivable, servicable roadworthy cars off the road in the Scrappage Scheme, thats 200,000 less used cars in the circuit. The ones which survived the cull obviously now cost more, supply and demand etc.

Out of interest what is the car?

Popular cars. If its got a good service history it should find a buyer reasonably quickly at a reasonable price.

Then regardless of time of year a car like that should sell eventually. Dont do yourself out of money by giving it a low price just for a quick sale (unless you need it sold quickly), price it reasonably, competativley, compare it to the price of similar cars within say a 40 mile radius of you (sometimes buyers will pay extra to buy one closer to them even if the mathematics of it doesnt work in their favour, its the convenience factor) and wait.