Welcome to the world of new car dealerships. Buckle up.
Joined March 2023
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I would give $1000 less than any new CDJR vehicle sold by Carvana.
Show me the printout from the website.
I beat the price by at least $1,000.
Get you a better interest rate and get you in and out in 30 minutes.
Or I’ll just bring it to you.
And most dealers would.
Soon both consumers and Carvana will realize that.
One underreported aspect of owning Multifamily real estate…
Tenant dies and other tenants report it…
A week later.
🤢
Car dealership social media.
Do random skits until one is successful.
Then watch everyone else copy your skit for the next month.
Oh wait, that’s how every other decision in the dealership is managed too…
WHAT IS EVERYONE ELSE DOING?!
I am about to launch a massive ad campaign.
My first move?
Present it to my employees (all of them) and hype it the F up.
Impression share on my favorite Used Car Google Ad:
Carvana - 51.21%
Cargurus - 29.33%
Carmax - 21.94%
Me - 18.23%
Autotrader - 17.97%
Cars .com - 17.05%
DriveTime - 16.11%
Toyota Store - 14.75%
Carbravo - 12.69%
There's a bunch of takeaways here...
Carvana wants to get ahead of our industry in the vehicle research process.
We’ve owned test drives, and good dealers capitalized.
Bad dealers sent customers to Carmax and Carvana.
We need more good dealers…and we need to own the test drive.
18 months ago I bought a Chevy store selling 13 cars a month…
This month, we are going to sell 150.
Is 13 to 200 possible in less than 2 years?
We bout to find out!
McDonald’s fries in Europe contain only 4 ingredients.
McDonald’s fries in the United States contain over 10.
Several of which are banned in Europe.
Yet, the same people who are mad about this, are also mad at Europe for being too restrictive.
Ford’s recent run-up wasn’t really about cars.
It was the market briefly waking up to the hidden value buried inside legacy OEMs.
These companies can build at scale, manage impossible supply chains, manufacture through chaos, and they’re critical to the economy and national defense. We saw it in WWII. We saw it during Covid. We’ll see it again.
Capital has rushed into AI chips, data centers, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, SpaceX, etc.
But OEMs may be sitting on one of the most underappreciated AI/industrial bull cases in the market:
Grid-scale battery storage for AI/data centers
Fleet operating systems
Autonomous logistics
Vehicle data + AI subscriptions
Defense/utility/emergency infrastructure platforms
The OEM CEOs who learn to speak this language and unlock these business models can pull capital back from “old economy” skepticism.
They don’t just build cars.
They build the physical world.
In a way similar government intervention makes things more expensive (ie Healthcare).
Manufacturer co-op money makes dealership advertising and software much more expensive.
The average dealership is sitting on nearly $20M in real estate and facility costs.
Add rising inventory levels, slowing sales, high interest rates, and expensive fuel, and the pressure on dealers is real.
Fixed costs are a problem.
One thing I will never do as a car dealer is over leverage myself and my business.
I will buy cheap stores until the expensive stores are cheap.
I haven’t been on here in a hot minute.
But, I have two takeaways:
Number 1 hybrids are hot as shit
Number 2 Kia customers don’t shop on third-party websites.
Carvana pays more for trades because they want your customer.
That’s it.
It’s not because they don’t pay sales people.
It’s not because their reconditioning is cheaper.
It’s not because they move cars around.
It’s because they want the customer more than you.
Spoiler alert: SEO is still more important than GEO and will be for a long time.
Consumers will have to fully adopt or tech companies will have to fully implement AI search in order for GEO to be something worthy of a large dealer investment.
Currently, it sits as something that is worth keeping an eye on.