Increase your used vehicle inventory by working with private sellers

Welcome to this week’s episode of Used Cars Weekly, the original CBT News show dedicated to bringing car dealers best practices and tips for the used car department, in-depth dealer interviews, hands-on dealership strategies, as well as vendor analysis. Today, host Jasen Rice, founder of Lotpop, discusses how dealerships can work with private sellers to onboard inventory in the current market.

Consumers sell almost as many used cars every year as automotive dealers. They’re typically 40 million used car sales out there in the auto industry, and 38 million are also done by private sellers. With the internet, it’s getting more and more popular for people to sell their vehicles online.

Rice says if you haven’t already started buying private acquisitions. There’s now an opportunity for consumers to know what their car is worth. Rice encourages dealers, as they reach out to sellers, to buy their cars or give them the opportunity to sell their cars. Rice says dealers have to let the customer know, that they can bring the vehicle to the dealership. If your customer is having issues with financing, the dealership can help with that, too.

Give the customer the opportunity to come to the dealership, with a safe place to do the transaction and possibly sell them a warranty they may be interested in. A multi-layer approach will benefit the dealership in the long run. Rice also says to start leasing, to get things going. If you can get better at leasing now, you’ll have more vehicles coming back to you in the near future.

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