Off-lease supply is ramping through the second half of 2026, EVs especially, and Cox economists name it as the risk to segment pricing.
If your mental model still says off-lease drought, it is about a year out of date. The drought ran 2023 to 2025 and it ended.
Why the stale version is dangerous
The drought framing tells a dealer that cars are scarce, so pay up, because the next one will cost more. That was true for a while. Running it into a supply ramp is how a store buys aggressively into a falling market and does not find out for ninety days.
The correct version is narrower and more useful. Gross is gone, not cars. Metal is coming. What is not coming back is the margin that used to sit on the retail side, which means the supply is arriving into a market that pays you less for handling it.
Gross is gone, not cars.
The EV wrinkle
Worth pricing separately rather than by rule of thumb. Segment-level moves on EVs have been larger and faster than the book on comparable age, and a store carrying two or three of them is carrying more variance than the unit count suggests.