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