12:09 pm, January 11, 2025
We were always promised there would be a January rush of used car buyers – but when you’re in the mindset of a quiet spell you never really believe it.
But our January sales came early at the Clever Car Collection with car buyers seemingly using the time in the run up to Christmas to snap up some cars.
For those who watch our regular video diaries on YouTube, you’ll know we’ve had a bit of a quiet spell at the end of November that filled us with dread.
We started over thinking everything and going back to the adverts we had online to check we hadn’t done anything wrong. We spent a lot of time improving the dealership and I genuinely think the time and effort we put into the photography back drop wall has helped boost sales.
Selling cars is a strange business. You can’t force people to come into your showroom and just have to have faith in what you’re doing, the marketing you’ve invested in and the processes you’ve put in place. But it certainly helps if you make your pics stand out.
December actually turned out to be our busiest month of the year. We flipped our preparation plans around and started preparing cars in advance – we got them serviced and MOT’d while we had a quiet spell so they were sat there ready to go.
It really has changed our minds as to the way forward. We sold four cars in December to distress buyers who needed a new car and needed it immediately. Two had cars that had been written off in accidents, two had catastrophic engine failures.
The fact they could walk into the showroom and drive away in the cars we had for sale was the main reason they came to us, so we’re going to try and keep this process going.
As Christmas approached, the phone continued to ring and we even took a reservation on Christmas Eve.
From Boxing Day onwards things really picked up. This week, we’ve sold three cars within 12 hours of advertising them – one of them just 30 minutes after we made it live.
After spending at least four hours on each cleaning, polishing, photographing and videoing them all, it’s a bittersweet feeling to sell it so quickly. I am not complaining, because that’s what we’re trying to do, but we’ve been running to keep up.
In this week’s video update, which covers a three-week period, we’ve also been organising the collection of all the cars the dealers bought us as part of the Carwow Battle of the Buyers challenge.
We’ve ended up with six cars from the competition and all of them arrived this week. We’ll be doing a special video about that next week and then getting them up for sale at the same time to start the competition.
If you missed that one, we’ve got four dealers competing with us to buy the used car that sells the fastest. I’m hoping we’ve picked the winner with a little bit of help from AI.
Also this week we continue our quest to get FCA approval with the help of the Automotive Compliance team and finally find some new insurance that’s actually fit for purpose with the help of Howdens. I can’t thank both firms enough.
You can check out the latest video diary for the AI Car Dealership project at the top of this post.
