Jasen Rice continues to help dealers examine inventory age and turn in his latest Lotpartyshow.com tip.

In this quick tip Jasen Rice goes over how much inventory should be in your age buckets for your inventory.

In this Lotpartyshow.com quick tip, Jasen Rice from Lotpop will go over what to expect in the month of June and why you should be concerned about late model cars over the next 6 months. 

Jasen Rice explains why dealers should use flat pricing on their inventory to maximize exposure in searches on third-party listing sites.

Seen this new ad for Subway, Do you think it makes car sales people look bad. It's funny but it does basically call used car sales people liars. 

I have always wondered what is going to be the next "Classic Car". I watch Mecum Auctions and Barrett Jackson auctions and wonder, whats on the road today that will be running through these lanes for stupid money 20-30 years down the road? What somewhat common, everyday type car will people be kicking themselves, when they are 60 years old, that they wish they never got rid of? I think this would be a good topic for this crew...chim in with what you think will be worth money 20-30 years from now that was built 1990's til now.

One of my picks would be the Pontiac Solstice for the common car, but the coupe for that rare car. I had one as a fun Sunday convertible car, but then traded it in for something more practical with kids and got a Jeep Wrangler, I think I will be kicking myself down the road. My reasons would be that Pontiac was a huge staple in the car industry and is no longer in production and thay only built 65,724 total Solstice from 2006-2010 and they are a car that will look good on the road still 20-30 years from now. Here are the numbers from Wikipedia

The car went on sale in early 2009.^[4] The Pontiac Solstice Coupes are considered to be quite rare: There were a total of 1,266 Solstice Coupes that were able to be manufactured before the production line in Wilmington, Delaware was shut down: 102 pre-production 2009 models, 1,152 sequentially-vin'd regular production 2009 models, and 12 pre-production 2010 models. This is in contrast to over 64,000 of the Pontiac Solstice Convertibles that were manufactured.

What is your pick for "that car to hold on to"?

This used car tip is the easiest tip but very time consuming. Do a virtual lot walk of all your inventory online. As I consult dealers on used car sales, this is one of the biggest steps that gets ignored every day. Good used car managers will walk their physical lot every day and make sure holes are filled, cars are clean and standing tall, but they don't do a virtual lot walk to make sure they are standing tall online. You will get 100 times more customers looking at your cars online then you will have customers looking at them on the lot but yet I see so many used cars listed with horrible photos and comments which will cause them not to be sold. 
HERE ARE SOME EXAMPLE OF WHAT WE HAVE RAN INTO OVER THE YEARS  for more of these follow #virtuallotwalk

Over the 9 plus years of consulting automotive dealerships on used car sales, I have seen too many good used car operations that have an average day of 30 or less and still struggle with gross and volume and there usually a common thread with these stores.
That thread is "date of last price change" and these "price change date" can go one of 2 ways: 
1. too many small price changes (their last price change would show they just changed prices a couple of days ago)
or the most common one 
2. they have not changed the price on 20-30% of their inventory in over 2-4+ weeks. 

To cover the first one, I believe that if you price the vehicle right the first time, you shouldn't have to do too many price changes. There are a lot of dealerships that just change a price of a used car just to change the price and keep their system clean. They change it a $100 here and a $100 there but never really change the market of that vehicle. I have had dealers drop the price $100 a week later raise it $75 to then drop it $100 again and so in a month period, that vehicles price to the market really never changed. This strategy has worked for some dealers but I find it to be more work then really being effective in the market and I would rather make bigger price changes $250-$500 every 2 weeks or so and be more strategic with price changes then to change the price every 5-7 days just to keep their system updated with price changes. 
That brings me to the 2nd price change date issue that I typically run into and that is not changing the price of a vehicle for weeks. I can ask most any used car manager how often do they change a price of a vehicle and they would always tell me that they look at pricing every day and that they change prices a couple of times a week. The catch here is that I asked them how often do they change the price of "a vehicle" not how often do they change prices. If this is a dealerships that is struggling with gross and volume, I could always go to their inventory (in vAuto), sort it by the last time that they changed the price by oldest date to newest and what you would see are cars that have not had a price change in over a month and those cars are usually 30-50 days old (see image above). 
Here is how this happens. 
The used car manager is juggling 20+ hats at the dealership so when it typically comes time to handle the inventory and pricing they are limited on their time so they focus on the 2 major areas of used car management. 

1. fresh units
2. aged units

1st, the fresh units, they need to get them through the shop, detailed, photo'd, commented, priced and that can take a lot of time. Then the 2nd area is the aged units because they need to get off the lot ASAP. 
And so when they are done managing these 2 areas, they are off to other responsibilities. This leaves the middle bucket cars untouched because they are not fresh any more and they are not aged yet (off their radar). This manager is usually good at handling age so he will make sure that they are blown out of the inventory when they get old and that causes the gross issue. Most of these stores will end up selling 20-50% of their used car inventory from 61+ day old cars which won't carry much markup by then. 
So even though this store could have a 30 day average age for their inventory, their gross and volume are lacking because of this "last price change" issue. More on the best practices of how much sold % should come from your 0-30 day old cars and how much % should come from your 61+ in a future post.

Craigslist has had a change in layout and search abilities for a while but there is a major issue in their new filters. Dealerships are missing a ton of searches when a customer is filtering down the search.

The image I included in this post shows how consumers now have the ability to search by type: truck, sedan, convertible, wagon, and other criteria....but a lot of dealers feeds are not going over with the type in the right field. On the VDP page on a vehicle on Craigslist look to the right of the photo, there is a break down of what the new search filters are being using to display cars. If a customer uses one of these new filters and you don't have those fields filled out, you are missing SRPs. I have tried it with a couple of stores that are using a company to feed their inventory to Craigslist and the dealers cars are not showing up when I am doing searches for type like truck or sedan. If you are listing on Craigslist, go to their site and your market looking for Cars + Trucks by Dealer, put your dealerships name in the search bar and your vehicles should show up. Then on the left side filters, narrow your inventory down to a type like truck or sedan to see if your vehicles show up. They have the ability to search for truck or pick up and that is causing an issue too, depending on how you list it if you do have it in the right field. If you are uploading your vehicles manually you are probably doing it right, if you are using a company, I think there are a lot of companies that haven't caught up to this issue. Get with these companies and get this issue fixed, you are spending a lot of money for this service and you are not getting your money's worth now. 

And just because drivingsales.com doesn't let me post more photos, I have posted screenshots on my blog for examples of what a right truck listing should look like and then one with a pick up and what it looks like. I also have a good and bad sedan, just go to automotiverevolution.com if you want to see screen shots, sorry not promoting just wanting to share what to look for.

You may have never heard of CPS, and I know this because it is an acronym that I just started trending out over the last 6 months that can justify why your traffic on sites like Autotrader and cars.com could be off or maybe performing better than usual.  

CPS stands for Cars Per Shopper and its a number that we have been tracking weekly looking at the amount of shoppers on Autotrader divided by the amount of total cars listing that given week, we even break it down to new and used vehicles listed. This number is driving dealerships SRPs (search result pages) and it’s a number that you would want to know when you are deciding how many vehicles should you be carrying, how aggressive you should price your cars, and help your decisions on packaging and spotlight exposure with Autotrader.

Here is how it works, let’s say you have 20,000 local shoppers last week and there were 20,000 total cars listed on Autotrader that same week, well then you would have 1 car per shopper for a 1 to 1 ratio. Now let’s take it to the extreme and say the next week you had 20,000 shoppers again but now there are 40,000 vehicles listed on Autotrader and now there are 2 cars per shopper. That’s a huge change in the market and you now have twice the amount of cars you are competing against to the same amount of shoppers.  That means it’s a buyers’ market now and you will need to get more exposure on your vehicles (maybe upgrade packaging, spotlight more cars) and get more aggressive with pricing your inventory. But let’s say it goes the other way and you have 20,000 shoppers for 10,000 vehicles listed so you have 0.5 cars per shopper and it becomes more of a sellers’ market and you may not have to price as aggressive to get exposure.

I have had a lot of conversations over the years with dealerships who were wondering why their used car traffic was dropping but they didn’t really change anything with their inventory. They were carrying the same amount of cars, photos and descriptions were good and the inventory was getting on line in a timely fashion but traffic was way down. I really didn’t have any explanation for the drop other than to have the dealer check with their local AT can Cars.com reps to see if traffic was down. But now by tracking CPS we have been seeing dealerships SRPs drop off because there have been less customers in the market shopping and more used vehicles listed for sale. One dealer had a 10% drop in shoppers and an increase of 10% more cars available for sale and in that same time period there was a 9% drop in their SRPs. We also had a dealer have the same amount of shopper’s week in and week out but there was an increase of 20% more used cars listed for sale in their market. Not only did they have that going against them but their own inventory count dropped by 20% and their SRPs dropped over 25%. The way out of this is getting their inventory count back up, get them listed as soon as possible to drive the SRPs back up, but also get more aggressive with their pricing to drive the VDPs up because they have more cars to compete against.

You can track your CPS numbers by taking your weekly “Tune Up” report from Autotrader and see how your market is doing or give me a call or email and I can help you get a look at what is going on with your numbers.