Easterns Automotive Group President Joel Bassam has stripped the traditional dealership model down to its essentials across 11 DC, Maryland, and Virginia locations.
No used car managers. No F&I boxes. No store-level inventory decisions.
"We're a full hub-and-spoke," Bassam told Daily Dealer Live hosts Sam D'Arc and Uli de' Martino. "Our stores, we call delivery centers. They only have sales, sales managers, and non-commissioned salespeople. Everything else is controlled out of corporate."
One inventory department handles acquisition, pricing, and transfers for the entire group, so store teams can focus purely on selling. It's lean, but Bassam says it's built for today's tight wholesale market.
"If you don't have a solid flow of trades coming in the door, it's really difficult to go out and find units," he said. That scarcity demands speed and efficiency, which a more centralized operation delivers.
Here's how the pieces fit together:
Easterns uses CarMax's online appraisal tool as a pricing guide. When a customer brings in a trade, they check what CarMax would pay for that same car.
"We've fully embraced Max Offer as, effectively, a book value," Bassam said.
If CarMax's offer is higher than what Easterns wants to pay, they'll tell the customer to sell it to CarMax instead. No negotiation needed.
"There are instances where they'll put a number on a vehicle that we don't necessarily agree with, and we'll sell them that car. We're okay with that because of the economics of it,” he explained.
Bassam says it’s a response to more customers arriving with offers from multiple companies.
And by using the competitor's pricing tool to set a floor, Easterns can either beat it or send the customer there. No more guessing games on trade values.
If we’re talking recon: They've eliminated lag time entirely.
When Easterns buys from Manheim, "that car has an RO created, is live on the website with condition report photos, and parts have been ordered while it's still sitting on a lot in Pennsylvania,” per Bassam.
And for F&I: There's zero mystery pricing.
All product costs are posted publicly on vehicle pages before customers arrive.
"There's no gate to figure out what the best price of the vehicle is," Bassam said. "There's no PII gate for figuring out what a warranty or extended VC would cost."
And even aged inventory policies got tossed, a move Bassam says other dealers are making too.
"Another dealer said the same thing, where the idea of aged inventory policies, when there aren't available replacement units, is definitely not something that is important right now," he added.
Bottom line: As wholesale supply stays tight and replacement units remain hard to find, Bassam is betting that one unified system might beat a dozen different playbooks.
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