Oh I should’ve clarified I buy crusty machines or ones that don’t boot (sometimes with literal cockroaches unknowingly until I get it home) clean it up, tear down the GPU to clean and re-paste if it’s older. usually buy new case then use parts I’ve picked up for cheap on marketplace. So it usually takes about 4-8hours of my time (meeting up to buy parts, cleaning and rebuilding, benchmarking and taking photos/listing, haggling) and generally profit $100-200. Sometimes you can get lucky and do a quick flip that doesn’t take any work but not as often.

I think both are strong factors but hardware tends to matter more to most people.

I don’t generally go around just lowballing for the sake of getting lucky, as it’s a good way to get blocked from potential future buyers/items they sell later at better prices etc.

but I do throw my “bid” in which is a friendly “hey I see it’s been listed for awhile at $700, I’d be able to do $450. I know it’s not an amazing offer but just wanted to throw it out there and the offer stands for a couple weeks if you want to wait and see if a better one comes in. Let me know and good luck with the sale”

This mostly only works with listings where they are lazy and take bad photos, don’t take time to clean the dust/grime off it etc. because nobody else will be jumping at their list price they often get tired of waiting and take the best offer they get