Here is the single most useful number in the entire acquisition argument: what a dealer makes on a car bought off the street versus the same car bought at auction, in dollars per unit.
Nobody publishes it. We went looking and it is not there.
What does exist
Cox has the benefit qualitatively. 48% of dealers sourcing directly cite reduced auction reliance and 58% cite lower recon risk. That is real, and it is directional. It is not dollars per unit.
Auction buy fees are similarly soft. The commonly quoted range of $300 to $600, scaling past $1,500 on higher-priced units with transport separate, comes from trade and vendor sources rather than a neutral publisher. Treat it as directional and say so out loud.
We had a $2,200 figure. We could not source it, so we stopped using it.
Why we are telling you this
Because we were quoting one. A $2,200 street-versus-auction figure was in our own material until we went looking for where it came from and could not find it. It is gone now.
Anybody who hands you a specific number for this should be asked for the source, and that includes us. In a business where every vendor arrives with a statistic, the ones worth listening to are the ones who will tell you which of their numbers they cannot back up.