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Hey everyone,
Just had Eddie Stivers, President of Stivers Auto Group, on for an episode of the CDG Podcast.
He breaks down why his own cost of people is 56% of gross vs. Carvana's 20%, and outlines the plan to fix it within 36 months.
— CDG
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Welcome to the Market Pulse—your cheat sheet to auto retail, built to help dealers price right, stock smart, and stay ahead.
Used inventory is growing as sales cool: Supply hit 2.14 million units in June, up 1% from May, while days' supply climbed to 47, a nearly 3% jump.
Prices are leveling off, but not falling: Listing prices landed at $27,027 in June, up just $99 from May after a stretch of pretty high month-to-month increases.
Dealers are rethinking how they source, price, and staff acquisition: Bob Ruth Ford separates buying from pricing and pays reps on resale performance, not volume, while Honda Marysville staffs service-lane appraisals like a sales floor, with no proprietary software behind either approach.
(Source: Cox Automotive / Daily Dealer Live)
Used-vehicle inventory is growing as retail sales cool off.
Dealers in June were sitting on more used inventory than in May (up 1%), with franchised and independent dealers carrying a combined 2.14 million used vehicles in stock.
At the same time, the retail sales pace slowed by about 1.9% from May, while days' supply hit 47, a jump of nearly 3%.
USED-VEHICLE INVENTORY VOLUME
Translation: Fewer vehicles moving = more inventory piling up.
Cox Automotive chalks the slowdown up mostly to seasonality and the typical early-summer dips that show up every year.
That said, higher prices and general economic pressures are likely contributing too.
NOTE TO DEALERS:
Even with supply inching up and the sales pace slowing a tad, Cox Automotive reiterated (in the same used-car report) that auto loan credit access just hit its highest level in 10+ years, or since December 2015.
That means two things: Shoppers are still turning to used, even with demand cooling a touch, because new vehicles remain just as expensive. And with credit this loose, dealers have more room to structure deals that actually close.
Used-vehicle listing prices are sitting near $27,027, up just $99 from May.
Average used-vehicle listing prices landed at $27,027 in June, just $99 above May's $26,928.
As you can see in the chart below, this is a pretty subtle climb compared with the month-to-month price jumps throughout the spring.
AVERAGE USED-VEHICLE LISTING PRICE
Cox Automotive confirms that the earlier-in-the-year increases stemmed from rising wholesale values. But now that lots have more inventory, prices have room to level off instead of climbing as drastically.
WHY IT MATTERS:
Even though the increase in used-car prices slowed, June still marks the first time listing prices have topped $27,000 since the summer of 2023.
They're also up 6% vs. last year, which means dealers still have room to hold firm on price.
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We know used-vehicle inventory is growing and price growth is cooling, but sourcing hasn't gotten any easier.
So… here are a few scale-related dos and don'ts on used-vehicle acquisition, sourced from Daily Dealer Live interviews with Rob Dell of Bob Ruth Ford and Jeff Pister of Honda Marysville.
Do: Separate the person who buys the car from the person who prices it.
Dell, vice president of the Pennsylvania-based dealership, said that whoever acquires a vehicle hands it off to a dedicated pricing/merchandising person after two weeks, whose job is to move it within 30 days. From there, nothing sits past a hard 45-day cap.
The acquisition team, meanwhile, has five reps work inbound and outbound just to collect VINs and info, not to sell. A separate team of four to five people handles the actual appraisals. Two people run logistics, and about 20 part-time drivers physically move the cars.
"You separate that so whoever buys the car cannot price the car. Then, after that person has it for two weeks, it goes to another person who's gonna manage that car, and [their] job is to get rid of it by 30 days."
Rob Dell
The result: 86% of inventory sells in the first 30 days, and 52% of units sold generate a trade.
Do: Make appraisal the default for every service customer, and staff it like a sales floor.
Pister, executive manager with the Ohio-based shop, explained that they offer everyone a vehicle evaluation.
How it works: The person running the program is a former used-car manager, and the team uses Apollo plus a shared equity tool to run appraisals. No proprietary acquisition software.
In terms of staffing, they assign one consultant per 25-30 opportunities a month, with two additional consultants in training so they can eventually grow past their current capacity.
"We don't really put handcuffs on appraisal... I think having some people that have been in our company for some period of time, a familiar face to the service customer, it doesn't feel like a sales transaction. It feels like a friend."
Jeff Pister
This, in part, has his team pulling 108+ trades a month out of the service lane, on pace for 160-170 by year-end, working toward a longer-term goal of 200.
Do: Pay your acquisition team on a lag tied to resale performance, not units sourced.
Dell shared that reps earn more or less based on how a specific vehicle performed when it was later resold, not on how many cars they brought in.
In one example, he cited one appraiser averaging $400 a car on recon estimates versus another at just $14 a car, then adjusted coaching based on which channel each rep was working, trade versus cold acquisition.
"The better their purchases perform when they're sold... they can make more or less money based on that return. And that teaches them to become a better investor and more strategic,” Dell said.
Don’t: Overbuild your tech stack before your process works.
There’s no proprietary acquisition software involved in the above strategies. Honda Marysville uses Apollo and a generic equity tool.
Bob Ruth Ford runs a standard CRM plus spreadsheets, layering in ChatGPT and NotebookLM only for analysis, not even as the acquisition engine itself.
Dell even moved his acquisition and inventory staff into one shared office so departments could actually talk to each other directly instead of relying on tools to bridge the gap.
For every creative strategy you can experiment with on the new-vehicle side of the business, I feel like there are 10x the opportunities to switch things up in the used-vehicle department.
Pricing's a little more restrictive, sure, but: Acquisitions, how long you hold the unit for, and why?
Those all, within reason, are wide open for exploring what does and doesn't work, and what you'd rather do differently than those in your market.
