I sold my beloved van using TikTok

Read the full article by me on Business Insider.

I bought my beloved van in April 2021, just as COVID-19 restrictions in England finally began to lift.

In summer 2022, I took a two-month trip with my best friend, covering 4,000 miles traveling through northern France, Switzerland, Italy, and back up through southern France.

I returned the van to my mother's house and went back to Brighton to study for a master's degree in journalism.

By the time I came home, my van had a lot of costly mechanical problems after sitting in the driveway during wet and miserable winter months. As a student struggling for money, I knew it was time to sell.

Having bought it on Facebook Marketplace, I first tried to sell it there. I also listed it on various van-life Facebook groups.

I also began advertising the van on Instagram and Gumtree, with the asking price starting at £6,000. I wanted to get back at least what I had put toward the renovation on top of what I paid for the van.

After months of refreshing the ads and lowering the price, I was starting to think it would sit in the driveway for another winter.

One day, I was scrolling through TikTok and came across a viral post of photos of someone's van, with thousands of likes and comments. I had created a new account on TikTok to document my travels but it hadn't occurred to me that it was somewhere you could sell things.

I started looking at what music was making TikToks viral and what hashtags to use, such as #vanlifeconversion and #vanlifetravel.

I said where the van was and listed an asking price of £5,700 or nearest offer, along with all the key features that came with it. I used 11 photos of as many features as I thought people should see, from its fitted kitchen to its two beds.

I wasn't entirely sure how this would pan out. But I trusted that Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer" and the van's beauty would drive views.

Within a few minutes of posting it, I was in awe, watching the view count go up by hundreds.

Many comments were compliments about the van, and people said they'd love to live out of it at some point. With this post doing so well, I thought I'd try it on my personal TikTok account, even though it only had 25 followers, all of whom were close friends or family.

I used the same formatting as the TikTok on my van-life account. But this time, I wrote captions on each photo with fun emojis. This post generated over 118,000 views, far more than the first's 20,000. The second post has more than 6,000 likes and 250 comments. Hundreds of thousands of people had seen my van.

Despite the post's international reach, the eventual buyer lived 15 minutes away and paid £5,300.

The experience surprised and impressed me. I didn't realize I could use TikTok to sell something like this. Around the same time, my partner's family listed their house to rent. We all joked that I could post it on TikTok if they struggled to find someone.

But selling my van on TikTok left me missing van life. Ultimately, it helped convince me to move to New Zealand and take up van life there.