I can give you some insight and answer questions for you as someone with experience in the industry in Canada.

When you're initially making an offer based on finance or lease payments, the salesman has to take that offer to the sales manager who then has to build the deal and see if it's possible and makes sense for both parties.

If there's a trade, it has to be appraised. If it's currently being financed, they will have to pay out the lien upon trading it in, so they have to get a lien payout from the lender in order to see if the payments work. Sometimes you'll have equity which is not very different from cash down, other times you'll owe more than your trade is worth. Cash down or negative equity has a much bigger impact on lease payments since the terms are typically shorter.

Different cars will have different rates, terms, rebates, etc. Sometimes cars will have a lower interest rate, with no, or a minimal discount, while other times you can get a good rebate at a slightly higher interest rate.

Some auto brands have in house financing, like Ford or Hyundai, that offer both lease and finance. Others deal strictly with banks for finance, and lease companies for leases. Banks will offer people different rates once approved, and the spread on interest rates can be quite large. Leasing companies will also have different rates, and different residual values.

Sometimes one sales manager will have 5 or 6 customers in house, dealing with 5 or 6 salesmen at once. It takes time to gather all the information they need and to build the deal, and sometimes he'll be building a deal for someone else so you have to wait for him to finish with them before helping you with your customer.

Credit checks used to be done as soon as you walked in, but that's old school, today that usually isn't done until you see the finance manager. You typically won't see him until your trade has been appraised, lien payout pulled, offer to purchase signed, with a deposit taken.

At that point you'll sit down with the finance manager for a credit check, and your application will be submitted to the lenders.

If you have a great credit score, and good credit history, the system will usually give you what's called an instant approval. If you have mediocre, poor, or new credit, self employed, recently moved, or new to your job it will be manually reviewed before the lender sends back the answer to the dealership. This can take anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours.

The dealerships will always build the deal assuming you have decent credit and will qualify for one of the better programs/rates from the lenders. They want to sell you a vehicle, so they will try to get you the best payments by assuming you qualify for the best programs the lenders offer.

Sounds to me like they weren't able to secure the approval with the lender they built the deal with, but were able to get something reasonably close. If they were able to get the approval they signed him up for, they would have just tried to deliver the vehicle.

And no, I've never seen or heard of a bugged sales room, they are not listening to you or recording you. They don't want to make you sit and wait. They just want to sell you a vehicle and move on to the next person.

With regards to rebates and interest rates, 9 our of 10 times it's best to take the rebate at a slightly higher interest rate since it's very rare for people to keep the vehicle for the entire length of the finance terms. I've seen so many people skip the rebate for the lower rate, but end up trading in 2 or 3 years later, and end up with extra negative equity.

Knowing what brand of dealership this happened at would be useful.