Help talk me off of the ledge

[cressidi65]

Hi Everyone,

This is my first post, I stumbled across this form as I was searching for marketing ideas for my small used car dealership. I saw some good comments on here so I thought I'd join up.

We are a small used car dealership in a rural area about 1hr away from the Twin Cities in MN. We are mainly a repair shop, with the car sales segment of our business growing since 2019. We moved into what I call our "Main" location about 1.5 years ago. We sold just over 100 vehicles in 2025. My goal in 2026 is to sell 120 vehicles. We have been working on speeding up our reconditioning operation, which is where I expect the growth to come from (In 2025 we ran into times where we only had 3 cars on the lot because we sold almost everything, and our service department was too overwhelmed to get the lot cars done in a timely manner).

Now that our service department can get the cars on the lot in a timely manner we have 13 cars on the lot, with 3 or 4 more coming on the lot in the next week. The problem is.....We aren't hardly selling anything. I think we moved 5 cars in Jan 2026 and like 5 cars in December 2025. 1 year ago in Jan 2025 I think we sold like 17 vehicles. We advertise on Facebook, Craigslist, carsforsale.com, findcars.com, I do test drive videos, and technical videos. Last year in Jan it seemed as if I posted 2 videos on Facebook and Tiktok we would sell like 3 cars. Now posting videos doesn't seem to be yielding any results.

Is this a market issue right now? Am I doing something wrong? Are our prices too high? Bad mix of vehicles? Part of me worries it is a pricing issue, as we do ask near clean retail for our vehicles as we make a significant investment into most of them with repairs, maintenance, etc. I wonder if we just need to be XX% under market rate in order for people to make the drive? But then again when I use carsforsale.com to look at other dealers in the area, we are on the lower end of the spectrum for some vehicles, and they still are sitting.

I just need the reassurance of random internet strangers Hypic Prompt that everything will be ok. As I am starting to lose my mind.

-Peter

Is this a market issue right now?