Always points back to one truth in this industry, "He who has the cars, wins the game." And one of the key rules of the game has always been and will continue to be, "You don't have own them to sell them and make money. You just have to have access to them"- its called Inventory Sourcing, and Carvana, Carmax, AutoNation and the other goliaths are leveraging their size and scale to dominate the traditional sources - eventually at the expense of small-medium sized independent dealers - think mom-and-pop hardware stores, then came Home Depot/Lowes and now Amazon. The auto industry is huge and still extremely fragmented market shares, but the big guys keep getting bigger and that's how it happen over time.
Any dealers out there feel good about going to auction the past 3-4 years? Prices are up, buy fees are way up and margins for average independents are falling (hard to compete against no-haggle, high volume, tech-savvy retail giants). I don't want to sound like the sky is falling, because it isn't (noticably) and I am not here trying to sell anything. But, I will share with everyone who will listen - if you haven't considered "consignment" as an untapped, proven inventory source, then you should at least look into it (again, "you don't have to own it to sell it and make money"). Consignment isn't the cure all and its not going to replace the traditional sources (auction, trade-in, etc.), but its a safe arena (source) for now where the giants aren't playing.
Hit me up if you want more info about how consignment works for dealers. I am a small independent dealer (since 2013) and also Founder & CEO of Retail My Ride - the first & only online platform (free) that helps fellow dealers source their inventory through professional consignment.
aimgroup.com
This is what a Carvana Marketplace listing looks like today. You can see above the year/make/model there's a light grey word, "Partner". This distinguishes it as a car owned by a third-party dealership. Of course, the photography is also very different: the photo was taken at the partner's lot, with all signage obscured to discourage the customer from trying to find the car on the partner's website. The badging used to be more obvious, but now it's just light grey -- you hardly notice it.
