00:05
Hello, and welcome to the end of Pendant Dealer podcast brought to you by Buckeye Risk Services.
00:12
Luke, how are things going for you, man? What's up with your lot? Is it looking fresh? Is it looking?
00:18
Looks nothing like Jason Barry's lot. I can tell you that.
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Yeah, your lot looks like his parking lot. Yeah, it's not even his employee.
00:30
Well, he's parking at the dealership and I got cars.
00:33
That's funny. Yeah. Well, so you guys know, we brought on Mr. Jason Barry again.
00:39
I remember what episode Jason was. I mean, it had to have been.
00:42
It's been a while. I should have looked that up. Yeah.
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So if you want more background on Jason, you go back, listen to that episode.
00:49
But the reason we brought you on, Jason, and dude, you have the coolest freaking
00:56
perspective on the industry, right? For those of you guys that don't know, Jason is
01:01
a full-time operator, like running his dealerships, buying cars, handling huge volumes we'll get into.
01:08
But also you've got Karketa, which is your, you kind of scratched your own itch on the
01:13
software, the recon, the acquisition side, right? Yep.
01:17
Yeah. So, yeah, I have an independent dealership originally started. Just a little background
01:23
on that. I started when I was 22 years old, scaled from basically zero up to we fluctuate in
01:30
between 680 to 730 and inventory. And then yeah, out of necessity, we built Karketa to handle processes,
01:39
acquisitions, help out on pricing and appraisals. The whole like kind of operations behind a
01:45
dealership was the birth of Karketa. And yeah, so it helps us operate at a high volume rate.
01:54
And yeah. That's so funny. Like, he had a problem and he built software to solve it. Like, I don't
02:04
have that brain capacity. I'm glad you do. I would go, I have a problem that I'm going to
02:08
complain about it the whole time and not do anything about it. Yeah. I mean, when you got
02:13
really smart people around you, you just tell them what the problem is and they help you
02:16
figure it out. So it's been good. And then at some point you decided, hey, I can sell
02:22
this to everybody else. Yeah. And that really was what it was as we just said, hey, like I'm sure
02:27
other people are struggling with the reconditioning side, getting cars ready for sale, maintaining
02:32
the front line. And obviously pricing appraisal is one of the most important pieces of dealership
02:39
operations. So I mean, there was a need, you know, obviously to some capacity on the
02:45
recon side, depending on size of operation, but everyone needs pricing and appraisal and
02:50
multiple price cars for and stuff. And the cool thing is it's blended into one system. So
02:56
it makes it really easy to where if the car is not on the front line, you're not going to adjust
03:00
price, right? So the clarity of cars and where they're at physically and in the preparation
03:05
process, having those go hand in hand is a real key differentiator on the carcetta side
03:11
that makes operating a lot easier. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. What do you do? Like,
03:18
are you just, is it all about like the velocity model where I'm just like making
03:23
peanuts on these things and just trying to sell them as quick as possible?
03:27
Yeah. I mean, obviously we try to make as much as possible. A lot of people,
03:31
a lot of people don't realize like how much is actually lost in your reconditioning process,
03:36
right? Whether it's like not shopping parts suppliers or vendors may be taking advantage of
03:42
you, maybe not getting bulk rates. Because I mean, when we're all standing, you know, you log
03:48
on to simulcast and there's 106 guys standing in the lane on simulcast. Like there's a good
03:54
likelihood that we're all going to pay roughly the same money. And really like the exit strategy,
04:00
retail or wholesale and then maintaining your margins and getting that car ready for sale.
04:05
I think it's so key. In fact, like we require a minimum shopping of parts. Like we have to
04:14
have three different quotes before we buy anything. And it's just like those because sometimes you
04:19
can, you know, parts can be three to $500 difference, you know, whether you're
04:23
buying it from the dealer or shopping an aftermarket supplier. So just like maintaining
04:31
your margins. But yeah, we definitely focus on a high volume model.
04:36
Do you have a do you have a rule when it comes to because I mean, we train our inventory manager to
04:43
and our parts managers to to shop the best price, right? What is the what is the rule when,
04:49
okay, this part is $300 cheaper, but it's going to take me five days to get it. Where does
04:53
that, where does that go together? Yeah, I think that's always a battle, you know, like
04:59
like, like, for instance, I had we were talking about buying a part today, you know, the difference
05:04
we had a dealer that's $130 and we can get the part today, or we buy it from eBay and it may fit,
05:10
it may not fit. It's an aftermarket part. And it's $40 cheaper. And I'm like, all right, buy
05:15
from the dealer, you know, because it's guaranteed get a fit. And and we can get it
05:20
like same day, right? And so that that's been super helpful. You know, like a lot of
05:28
using we actually use like chat GBT for like labor times, labor times, and actually shopping parts
05:34
as well, which has been really, really helpful for people that maybe don't know like, like,
05:38
because a lot of people sometimes shopping parts is just you need more hands. And being able to
05:44
use like some resources like that to shop like, Hey, what is the expected labor time?
05:49
How does this fit in the schedule and recon? And is can I find it cheaper somewhere else
05:55
has been really, really helpful? So we've utilized resources like that
06:00
to help out as well. Yeah, we hadn't we hadn't heard that yet, Jeff, people use an AI when it comes to
06:06
part shopping and labor time. It actually works fantastic for labor time, like labor time,
06:13
service work, stuff like that. Yeah, it works really, really well. So you're are you leveraging
06:19
that compared to, you know, the normal labor book, are you getting like a real idea? Is that what that
06:28
is? Yeah, we don't we don't like we don't play pay flat rate in the shop or do a lot of customer
06:33
pay. So it's not super. It's more just like a rough estimate of how like, how does this fit into
06:39
our recon process? And how do I schedule the day? Okay, we have we have team members that
06:44
basically when parts come in, they're lining out the day and saying, Hey, here's your task sheet
06:50
out of cartata. This is what you need to complete scan it and complete it when you're done and move
06:54
the card the next phase. So it's really more just like rough guess. Okay, that makes sense.
07:00
So let me talk about that then that speed through. What's your typical goal on like time to line
07:06
from the auction hammer dropping to when you have it ready to merchandise and sit on the
07:10
front line? What's obviously I guarantee your organization has a goal, and it's probably freaking
07:15
tiny, right? You know, a lot of people a lot of people look at it as like average, average,
07:22
like time to line or whatever. And I think a lot of the other competitors like focus on that.
07:27
Although, like every car is pretty unique from a CR perspective, or like parts availability
07:33
perspective, I don't necessarily focus as much on like my time to line as much as I do on
07:39
percentage of vehicles on my front line versus relative to the total amount of inventory that I
07:44
own. So I'm more looking and for operational perspective, we look at percentage of vehicles
07:52
that are on the front line, more than focused on time to line because every car is unique
07:56
and individual. So as long as we're operating between the 70 80% of our vehicles on the
08:02
front line, that's like our health metric, right? And it seems like it seems like at
08:06
the beginning of the week, we'll float down to like 72 73% on the front line. And then towards
08:11
the end of the week, we can trail up to like 76 to 78% on the front line. And I think most dealerships
08:19
is right in that range. So I'm more focused on percentage of vehicles on the front line rather
08:24
than a time to line metrics. So many of you that metric and they don't include
08:31
mechanic and they don't include and it's like it becomes a facade at that point, in my opinion.
08:37
This is a metric marshals owner from Freeman Motor Company always talked about. And that's
08:42
and they paid their some of their bonus structure was on that. And it makes it makes a lot of
08:49
sense. And I've always looked at it the opposite way, you know, from the time you buy it to get
08:53
it there, you know, you make it happen. Before we came on this Jason, you said something
08:58
that I thought was was big. You were talking about how many cars you needed on your front line
09:04
to make sure you're selling 223 cars a month. And I think you set up with 500. Is that right?
09:10
Yeah. So I mean, a few years back, I started to list everything like the second I bought it,
09:15
right? So if you go on my website, like I'm going to have everything listed,
09:19
whether it's here or not or front line or whatever, because I want to start acquiring
09:22
traffic. Well, in doing so, I actually kind of lost path of like how many cars are actually
09:29
ready for sale versus like how many cars do I have on my website. And it was a realization maybe
09:36
like two years ago is like, Oh, my gosh, like we have all this inventory on our website,
09:40
but a good majority of that car is not ready for sale. And so we really started to focus
09:46
on like, what is the life cycle of the dealership or what is like the flywheel
09:51
dealership that really makes it go round. And that's purchasing that's front line units,
09:56
that's number of leads, that's funding. And we kind of created this flywheel. And
10:02
and we started to realize like, Hey, if we can keep over a 525 number on the front line,
10:07
like really consistently, we're going to sell 225 or above, right? Based on and you
10:14
back out like how many leads am I getting at what closing percentages. And we're not
10:19
necessarily like as a dealership, we're not necessarily focused on growing inventory too much
10:23
more. We're focused a good majority of what we're doing today on improving that that math.
10:30
And if you have a few avenues that we're going to try out this year,
10:33
that we think are going to be pretty optimistic so far. And when you talk about improving
10:38
the math, you talk about selling more cars with 525 or okay, not moving that down to
10:44
400 and selling 225 steel. No, we just want to improve that that metric, right? How do we get rid
10:51
of where do we place these cars? If we have aging cars, if cars are going over 120 days old,
10:56
like what do we do with them? How do we exit at the most profitable scenario possible? And that's
11:02
like our focus right now. And we have a few different strategies that seem to be working
11:07
really well that we're trying out. And is the strategy, I'll go to one of Jeff's favorite
11:16
strategy, putting a bounty on an old car or is the strategy just dropping price?
11:22
What's the best strategy? Yeah, so that's always like that's always the like the big balance is
11:28
like how do I how do I retail out of everything, right? And historically I kind of thought about
11:32
and I'm going to bring up wholesale, right? So historically it was like in the dealership
11:39
it seemed like every time every time we wholesale anything, it was like, oh my gosh, we're admitting
11:43
defeat, we could not retail that car and now taking a loss, right? Like and I think that's
11:49
how I looked at it for the longest time. But when there was the, you know, funny enough,
11:55
but car offer came onto the scene. It was they just went out but car offer came onto the
12:01
scene. It was like, oh my gosh, we have we have profit in these vehicles like day four, right?
12:07
So do we really wanted to carry that car out 90 days or 60 days or whatever? According to car
12:12
category look at how many on average, how long should that car take to sell us sell us sell the
12:18
car? Do we want to wait out that full profit or do we want to turn that car? And that's
12:22
something that we're working on right now with actually placing cars and getting real life
12:29
bids as soon as we own them, right? Whether that's syndicating our inventory, managing a seller
12:34
dashboard on OVE, if that's some other like liquidation platforms, wholesaling them through
12:42
wholesalers, we're looking at every single opportunity from like a more of a speed perspective.
12:52
We may take a skinnier deal but we turn the car in four days. Like today we took a skinny
12:56
deal on a 90, it was like 90,000 mile Super Forester. I'm not like, yeah, I can make more money.
13:03
Not super excited about the car having 90,000 miles and I can make two grand today.
13:08
And if we've owned it four days, it hit the front line. Boom. So $2,000 deal, you know?
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And how about the ones that are 180 days or 120 days? Yeah. I mean, how do you move those
13:22
for some reason they won't sell. Yeah. And those are deals that we're just like, and sometimes
13:27
like I do think we can work it down and that's what we're going to try and do is it's pretty clear
13:32
that at 90 days, like everyone's trying to move out, right? 90 days and you may be able to
13:38
flow the car out like 120 days and still get out of it. If you got like by the time you get
13:43
doc fee and implement some of these back end ancillary products, you might be able to
13:48
move out positively. But 120 days, like to me and what I see in the data is like pretty clear.
13:55
Like for example, average days on market in a 300 mile range, considering 782 dealers in my market
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right here, average time on lots 90 days. So that tells me like, hey, like people are getting
14:10
out of these cars at 90 days, right? Like on average. So we and I can track that on a real
14:17
time perspective. So I'm like looking at like at aggressively at 90 days, but I'm also looking
14:26
as close as like a four day old unit, you know, like, does it make sense to trickle this out
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or or to wait out this profit? Or do we just take the deal and we move on to the next one? We turn
14:36
the money. If you took my data out of that, Jason, it would probably drop down to like 60
14:42
days in inventory. Sometimes I'm like, I'm weighing that average up.
14:48
I think it's in your sample size that I'm skewing it big time. But talk to me about the balance
14:53
because I feel like sometimes you do more and you make less money. Like how do you balance out
14:59
saying, I want to churn to 300 cars, but that means I'm taking another 100 skinny deals that
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I'm wholesaling. Is it worth it to go through all that process of buying all those extra
15:09
cars and transporting them and reconning them. And now you got a bigger shop. Now you got more
15:12
mechanics. Now you got more headache, more brain damage. And it's like, well,
15:17
like, how do you balance? Like, am I really making more money or am I just creating more
15:20
headache? Hey guys, real quick, just to jump in and make sure we do talk about Blitzpay,
15:25
obviously great sponsor of the podcast for quite a while and how I do all my payments
15:29
here at the car lot. And we are down to 9% delinquency. Luke, did you know that? That's
15:34
a record. My collector is hitting it really hard. She's got everybody set up on auto pay and wallet
15:40
pay and cash pay network. So we're doing fine right now. That's fantastic. The East Coast is
15:47
not in that situation currently. So good job. Way to go, Jeff. Why do you use Blitzpay?
15:57
Yeah. And yeah, that's always I think the balance because you look at like
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gross profit versus your net expenses and everything. You're like, am I really just
16:07
spending my wheels or am I making more money? Fortunately, like, we've been able to make
16:12
more money as we continue to sell more cars. But yeah, I mean, that's always a balance.
16:17
And I think that's one thing. Like, if I didn't have the good processes in place,
16:20
the good people in place, if I didn't have car credit and know where all the cars were
16:25
at every any given time, it would be very, very uncomfortable. And that's where I would
16:30
say like, because because we know where everything's out, we were able to trim a lot of fat too,
16:37
because we know where everything's at. And it's I mean, it's really pretty smooth. I think a lot
16:44
of a lot of like fat in a dealership is just lack of communication and where things are at,
16:51
you know, and that's where that's where I think it could if you increase inventory without
16:57
really good checks and balances and processes, you could get to this like law of diminishing
17:01
returns where it's like, I've grown, I've sold 300 cars, but I'm really making less money because
17:06
it takes 10 people to support that many more cars, right? And I think that's been something
17:11
that we've been really conscious of. As we've grown is like, Hey, in order for us to sell,
17:18
you know, 40 more cars, how many from a headcount perspective, how many people
17:23
does that take? You know, and according to the strategy right now, like, I think we're going to
17:29
increase number of I think we're going to increase by like 40 sales a month from a conservative
17:34
perspective. And I and I really added like two people to the team, you know, and as long as I
17:41
can turn out of those cars profitably in an adequate amount of time, then it makes it makes
17:47
a lot of sense. Yeah, that's super interesting. Do you have do you know that do you like
17:51
keep that my cost per sale, like my overhead per sale, you have that number, you just kind of
17:55
keep it in your brain and say, Hey, if we're going to crank an extra 40 cars, we've got a gross,
18:01
you know, two grand on them to even keep the lights on, we can't see cars with less gross.
18:08
Yeah, and that's another thing that I hit on just briefly before is like,
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there's so much money to be made on these back and ancillary products if you offer them
18:17
in the right way. And like, for example, we offer, we offer gap insurance warranty, we just added
18:24
another product that's key windshield and battery as a product, we offer VTR vehicle theft registration.
18:33
And we offer just a broader variety of products for these customers. And that's where I think
18:38
it's really, really important to help if you're going to move out of these cars at a really
18:44
skinny deal, you need to be really hyper focused on from an average perspective of the bucket,
18:50
am I maintaining enough margin per vehicle? And that's one thing that I watch really,
18:54
really close is, is I'll trickle these wholesale skinny deals out as that number allows, right?
19:01
Like if I'm going down to like, I'll go from $3,500 per copy front and back,
19:06
I'll go from 35 down to like 30, and I'll just like slam out a bunch of these like
19:12
skinny deals, right? I'll take 10, 15 skinny deals. And then, but I'm always watching that number
19:18
to make sure that the volume number supports still this an adequate profit margin. And
19:27
like I went from 35 down to three, and I slowed down those skinny deals, and I bounced back to
19:33
3146, I think is where we're at today, front and back. So making sure that you're, if you are
19:39
retailing those deals, you're really capitalizing on your offering on like a lot of these like
19:45
service contracts or some of these ancillary products. Yeah, we just implemented one called
19:52
Trust Point that is, I think is a really cool offering. I think it's useful for the customer
19:58
where it's a bundle package where it's windshield, it's battery and it's key.
20:05
And it's a no recourse to the dealer product at a really good price point that we just implemented
20:13
this last week and seem to have really good adoption by customers that I think is going to
20:19
work really well. But the long story short, it's just making sure that you're maximizing every
20:24
retail deal possible to be able to afford the skinny deals. Are these all third-party
20:29
products you sell? Yeah, I have a re-insurance portfolio that I use. Some are re-insured,
20:37
some are not. Okay, that volume, re-insurance would be, that would be equal, your re-insurance
20:46
company could be equal to your dealership, I feel like that volume. Yeah, call Bucca
20:50
re-insured risk services. This is their ad for back-end products. So Jason,
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you know, if we get on the Facebook pages, it seems like everybody's crying the
21:05
blues about how they aren't selling cars and what was me and the sky is falling.
21:12
Man, you said you're on pace to almost sell 300 cars this month. What do you
21:18
say to the dealers that are crying, crybabies? And what do you say, how do you fix the problem
21:26
if you're in that? Yeah, so I mean, it happens, it seems like every 15 days. I mean,
21:33
it realistically happens to everyone where it's like you go through these lulls and is it the
21:38
month or is it really slow or are you just asleep at the wheel? It's kind of like the
21:46
battle that I deal with every now and again where it's like, okay, is the market really slow or do
21:53
I need to do price checks? Have I been irregular on my price checks? Am I priced out of the market?
22:00
Do I have something wrong with my leads? First, I always default to like, are my prices right
22:06
and I'll price check everything, you know? And if I need to like speed the store up,
22:12
I'll price drop, you know? And it seems to always, as long as like marketing and you've
22:16
cast all your nets into these different like cars.com, car gurus, you know, these different
22:23
advertising platforms, as long as your net is cast, a lot of times these price adjustments
22:28
are going to send out notifications to customers that have already prospected on cars.
22:33
It can always like stir up some activity at the dealership. So that's always like my go to
22:37
is like, I'll go through and I'll just price check, you know? We've got to the point where
22:41
we price check like, I have two people that that's their full-time job is price checking.
22:49
So they literally price check every day to help even out that consistency of
22:54
making sure that the store is always really, really active. I think the store is what you
23:00
make it because at a price point, a car sells. And it's just a matter of like,
23:06
am I at a price point? Yeah. And am I moving fast enough to find that price point in an adequate
23:12
period of time? And do y'all change prices daily on every car or do you think it just
23:18
kind of depends on what the market is allowing? Yeah. I mean, they have at will to price
23:23
change every day. And sometimes we price adjust up. We may be short on a car and we may bring
23:30
the price up. And a lot of times, interestingly enough, it actually shakes out a lot of buyers
23:36
that are like, hey, I've been waiting for you to price drop, but the price went up.
23:40
And you're like, yeah, we just priced the market. And they're like,
23:44
well, can I, will you still order that lower price? And I'm like, you bet you, come on in
23:49
today. But yeah, I mean, and you'll be like, and you may like, shake out a customer that's
23:57
been just like waiting for you to price drop. They've been seeing that you've been price
24:00
dropping. So I think it's also price dropping down. I think it's also as important to price
24:06
drop or price raise occasionally as well or reset your price. Just after like 30, 40 days,
24:14
reset it to market and hang it out there for 10 days and then price drop down.
24:20
Interesting. Yeah, that is interesting. When do you, do you ever, I mean like with that strategy,
24:26
are you taking losses? Like talk to me about the losers and what percentage, like when do you
24:32
just cut bait? Because I could see like some of my aged inventory. And of course, I've never,
24:37
I mean, I love when cars hit birthdays here at my place. So when do I just like
24:43
drop that thing to wholesale and just get it out as quick as I can?
24:48
So it's all like, it's all like finding that balance of like the demand perspective. Like
24:53
that's where like in Carquetta, we can also, we have like our leads ported over to that
24:57
Chrome extension where we price check. And that's where we take leads into consideration.
25:03
And like if a car is just like flat, you know, and you've had it 60 days and you've had no
25:08
leads on it, like you better be at like a break even or like a little bit over and hope to
25:13
recoup on some back end or whatever. But like, yeah, I mean, those are the cars where it's like,
25:20
hey, this is a Honda cord or it was a Honda CRV the other day, like turns out that a 24 Honda
25:26
CRV EX like I can't sell it, you know, like it's been on the lot 120 days, you would think that's
25:33
the prime car. But it's been on the lot for 120 days, I have no leads on it. And I can
25:40
take a $1,500 loser today, like let's go like roll out, you know, because that car drops it drops
25:48
so much in price, like you just have to get out of it. Yeah, it's like, it's like, all right,
25:53
okay, we're out, you know, on to the next one and and re reallocate those funds and and and
25:59
take that as a learning experience. We have like a everyone that's in the buying everyone
26:04
that's on the buying host selling team is all in the same channel we used to Google chat
26:08
is all in the same channel. So we can all like as we're buying and looking for new inventory and
26:14
making these calls, like we're all very aligned on like, hey, that was a loser. That was like,
26:19
not a good one. There's no traction on this car. Hey, that was like a quick flip, you know.
26:25
But hey, that's a loser like don't buy any more of those. So we're all very in line. I
26:29
think there's like, I think there's like 13 people in that channel. That's all on that
26:33
team, whether you're a buyer, whether you're like a recon manager or you're like a wholesale person,
26:40
we're all very aligned in like the decision making on taking those losses.
26:45
And and Jason, how do you decide what cars to buy? And I know you're going to probably say it's
26:51
it's what we sell. But what is your strategy? What is your storage strategy always been?
26:55
Yeah, I mean, always, of course, like what your pedigree of a dealership of like what you
27:00
historically do well with. But I also take a look at like one thing that I can do. I hate
27:05
pump plugging carcaded too much, but I am like a consistent user. So I feel like I can plug it a
27:10
little bit. But like one thing I look at is you can actually look at like your market. So I have
27:16
782 dealers in a 300 mile range. And then I can go to actually like, I can look at a specific
27:22
dealership that I consider competition. And I can look at like that dealer and I can see
27:28
how many they have an inventory, how many they historically sold down to a trim level,
27:33
down to a VIN specific level. And I can see, oh, that dealer I consider my competition,
27:38
they did really well with a 2300 Santa Fe. It turned in 32 days and they have no more left.
27:45
Like, okay, I'm going to pick up some 2300 Santa Fe. So I can actually look at like
27:51
every dealership in my surrounding area. It's all data. It's all data. It's no
27:57
feeling. Yeah, no, it's, it's, I mean, some of it's feeling and I may get excited about.
28:03
Yeah. Have you seen the back end of those Santa Fe's? It's not feel. That's ugly, ugly, ugly car.
28:14
Jeff, I figured you would love it. You like the key of soul. You like these toaster ovens.
28:20
That Santa Fe is so beautiful from the front. And then as it turns from behind,
28:23
you're like, what happened there? I had a really funny joke here, but I was probably something good
28:30
in there, huh? But, but, but being data driven, give us a tidbit. What, what, what did you think
28:39
would sell well that just didn't? What did you put on like a, Hey, you know what, those
28:44
those new Toyota Tundras are just completely flat or the, you know, the new EV Silverado,
28:49
like just duds, like nobody wants them. Yeah, like, so for example, like I was saying, like a
28:55
two new like 2024 Honda CRV, right? You get your, you're, you're kissing that like 30,000 price range
29:02
for a Honda CRV. Like for me, I think it's just from a price perspective. I, you would think
29:08
because as a Honda, it's like, Oh, that's a seller, you know, but I can't give them away,
29:12
you know, especially at the price point that I need to pay for them, you know,
29:16
and like even down to like the Honda HRVs, similar type story. I don't do super well with a lot of EV
29:25
vehicles. I know there's hype around them. People seem to do well with them. But like, I've even tried
29:31
buying like low price model weight or model wise that I can retail in like the sub 25 range.
29:39
And they just do okay, you know, they do okay for me. Not great. A lot of like the EVs
29:47
don't do super well, like full electric. We do, we do great with hybrids, really great with hybrids.
29:54
Some of like the 23 Santa Fe's, I'm, for example, but 23 Santa Fe's Serenos seem to go a little
30:02
long on me. Like some diesel trucks that just require way too much recon, they're just super
30:11
rough 70,000 mile Duramax, that just requires a ton of recon sometimes goes along. Yeah, I mean,
30:19
those are those are cars that you would think are just like, yeah, that's a seller for sure,
30:24
you know, but they just, yeah, they don't for whatever reason, there's like this gap.
30:30
Yeah. And you, you, you can, I mean, you have a handful of high end stuff here on your website,
30:35
a couple of the $60,000 stuff. But do you find your bread and butter is kind of like in the basic
30:41
$20, $30,000 off rental return, like, yeah, you know, basic sedan.
30:49
Yeah. So that that's another thing that I watch pretty religiously is like,
30:53
what is the average list price in my market and the average list price right now in our
30:57
markets 27, 905. And from me, from a dealership perspective, my average price point retails
31:04
like 25. So I'm sitting just below like the average price point on vehicles, obviously,
31:09
that's a broad perspective, taking a lot of vehicles into consideration, but my bread and
31:14
butter is like late model, newer stuff. But that one thing to caution is like for every dealer
31:22
that does not work, you know, like, I had a buddy one time that was like stuck under a
31:26
bunch of cars. And I was, he's like, can you help me figure out what to do with these cars?
31:30
And he logged me into his DMS, I looked through his cars, I'm like, dude, you have like a bunch of like
31:36
at the time, I think it was like 2022. I was like, dude, you have a bunch of 21 Hyundai
31:41
Elantros, like, you're not going to compete with the Hyundai store down the street. I'm sorry,
31:46
like, you're not. And so that's like not your pedigree. You need to find something
31:52
that's maybe a little bit different, you know, an Audi Q5 with 70 K miles or something, you know,
31:59
like, so, so cautionary on, I think, competing too much on late model stuff, that's identical,
32:05
you know, especially, especially when the new car sales get slow, because they stick with
32:10
incentives in it that market does. Yeah, it wipes out a lot of that late model stuff.
32:16
Yeah, you can buy a new car cheaper. Let me ask one more question and close
32:20
it up. I know we got to let you go. Can small dealers get ahold of this kind of data? That's
32:25
the argument I think I have is that I get you're selling 300 cars a month. Yeah, you can afford
32:30
to have the fancy tools and the big data like the new car store guys have or everything's plugged
32:34
in and great. I got all this market analysis. But what if I'm like the 20 car a month dealership?
32:40
Like, I mean, I got a I got a small sample size, but B, I still want to be able to compete
32:45
with you and with other guys that are in my area. Like, how does the small guy
32:50
get access to this kind of data at an affordable price? Because I can't pay what,
32:55
you know, the 200 car a month guy can pay for it because I'm only running 20 cars
33:01
through it every month, you know? Yeah, and then that's the thing is like, I think there's a lot
33:05
of people that are like, oh, I can only use the auto or I can only use some of these like high
33:09
price solutions that's like really like we're all scraping or bringing in first party data
33:16
straight off dealerships websites. Like car kettles are really, really affordable solution.
33:20
And there's some other like really good ones out there as well, like not just car keta that like
33:26
that really as long as like I think one of the most important things on a praise tool
33:32
perspective is how you expand the market and how you like bring in the data. I'm obviously
33:39
biased to car keta because I helped build it. But like there's so many affordable solutions.
33:44
Like for instance, like car keta doesn't syndicate today, you know, like, but doesn't mean that you
33:49
can't have another syndication tool that you can't like pull over and price check against,
33:53
you know, there's lots of syndication opportunities out there. So it's just really
33:57
like how you configure your tech stack. But what I can tell you right now, like I've,
34:02
I know of like some of these high price solutions, I know of them. And I have been
34:08
able to somehow get by on a really affordable solution from the time I was,
34:14
you know, a really small store all the way up to 700 cars and inventory
34:19
and do quite well, you know, and all like really good price points. So it's just how you configure
34:26
your tech stack. And there's just there's a lot of them out there that do the job.
34:33
Don't be like, I would say don't be like, Oh, I have to use this solution and it's
34:39
for grand a month, you know, just because it's a robust solution doesn't mean it's the right solution.
34:46
Yeah, especially for smaller dealership. And by the way, Jeff, the original podcast was number
34:51
278 if you want to go back and get a basis. Nice. Yeah, cool. Thank you, Jason. Dude,
34:57
appreciate your time, man. Absolutely. I know you got a lot of shoveling horse horses,
35:02
dude. Out to clean stalls after. I appreciate you guys thinking about me for sure. Thanks for
35:11
having me on. All right, bud. Okay, take care, guys. Thank you for listening. Please leave
35:16
us a review. We'll catch you in the next episode.
