The Acquisition
Not when you sell it. Every dealer knows that, and almost nothing in the store is built around it. The buy still runs on one good buyer, the hours he is awake, and whatever is left in the lane after everybody else has picked through it.
This is the half of STRYKE that most stores turn on first. The Retail side is there when you want it.
What it does
You set the most you’ll pay, same as you would for anybody on your desk. That number is a wall, not a target. It doesn’t panic when the row gets thin and it doesn’t quietly creep up to protect volume.
Your buyer can only get to so many in a day, and he picks the ones that look best on paper. The engine takes all of them, Sunday included, and brings back the ones with a car worth buying.
First it asks the obvious question a good buyer would: is that offer in writing, and does it include the fees. If it turns out to be a website estimate, nothing moves.
If it’s real and it beats where you are by twenty-five dollars, the engine isn’t going to break your number over it and it isn’t going to let the car walk quietly either. It hands the deal to a person, because that one is a phone call, not a math problem.
No new tab and no new login for your people. The seller lands where your team already works, with the number and the history attached.
The one guy who buys right built that instinct over years, and today it only works where he’s standing. Put it in the system and it runs everywhere at once, including the ones he’d never have gotten to.
The math
An auction unit costs more than the hammer price. Add the buy fee, add the transport, then add whatever the store two towns over ran you up. A car in a driveway two miles away carries none of that.
The difference between what an auction car lands at and what you pay that guy, inside your number, is margin you keep on every copy.
And anybody who has sent a buyer to the sale knows the other half of it. If you don’t go in person, you end up paying when the car shows up. That’s just the reality of it.
It matters more now than it did five years ago. Used front-end gross per unit at the public groups is back at 2019 levels while the cars are not, down more than a third from the 2021 peak. The retail side gave the margin back. The buy is where it has to come from now. The numbers behind that are here.
Not the hammer price. Just the fees and the transport you eat on every unit you bring in from the sale. Put your own numbers in.
Where the cars are
Seventy percent of shoppers have a trade and franchise stores capture about 34% of them, per Cars Commerce. Dealers who appraise at a 2:1 ratio against sales hit at least 53%. The cars are not hiding. They are on your lot, in your service drive, and in driveways inside your own radius, and the constraint has always been how many conversations one buyer can have in a day.
Read the rest of it in Under the Number, sources and all.
Access
Put your name down and we’ll call you when a pilot spot opens.
No drip campaign. One message when your spot opens.