7:21 am, December 21, 2024
Would you let a bunch of other car dealers spend your own money to buy stock for your showroom?
I thought not, but for a special AI Car Dealership project video, that’s exactly what I did this week.
With the help of Carwow, I challenged four other car dealers to a battle of the buyers competition where five teams would buy cars for the Clever Car Collection – and the winner would be decided by the car that sells the fastest.
With margins so slim in the used car business, stock turn is really the name of the game so having the speediest shifting stock is key.
That’s why for this challenge we decided to choose the winner by the fastest selling car. We plan to advertise a car from each of the teams at exactly the same time in the new year and set the clock running to see which Joe Wallington and I can sell first.
Joining me for this challenge are the YouTube star and Used Car Award winner Joe Betty of Shifting Metal/Berrow Motors, Jo Smith and Jodie Barber from Wink Cars/The Female Car Dealers, Matt Kitson, general manager of TrustFord’s Castleford site and George Guy from Lithia Mercedes Benz.
Up until the Christmas slowdown, I’d been running at an average of 17 days to sell at my dealership, so for this challenge I was planning to deploy my usual car buying plan.
That technique involves using AI and Auto Trader’s help to bulk retail check the Carwow auction list to find cars that have high retail ratings, low projected days to sell and a market health score that showed there were more buyers out there than stock.
In the video of the challenge, which you can watch above, I laid down a few rules first: Cars could be no more than £8k retail, they had to be something the dealers would be happy to warrant and couldn’t be sold for a loss. And that was it.
The other dealers had a variety of tactics to use. Betty is famed for buying cars that are a little bit different and slightly more riskier, the Wink Cars team find German cars work well for them while the TrustFord and Lithia buyers were planning to stick closer to what they know.
You can find out what the dealers bought us in the video above and place your bets on which you think will sell the fastest.
The cars will be arriving at the Clever Car Collection en masse in January and we’ll be filming a video of their arrival before we get them prepped and up for sale.
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