22 Months of Wholesale Declines, Carvana Tax Credits, Google’s Advanced Protection

Kyle Mountsier: 0:09

Wednesday morning. July 10. We're ready to go. No Paul here. Jaden, it took a little falls youngest, but I got some real low hanging out with the fan. Let's go

‍Unknown: 0:22

to the people really want to know who that is

Kyle Mountsier: 0:24

and nothing about the stories. It's okay. We'll get there. We're talking about 22 months of wholesale clients, Carvana tax credits and Google's advanced protection today. Just something thought we'd throw in, in light of some security breaches going across the US, sir. Hello, how you doing, man?

Michael Cirillo: 0:46

What was security breaches? You're talking? Nothing?

Kyle Mountsier: 0:50

Nothing.

Michael Cirillo: 0:55

Great, man. How are you?

Kyle Mountsier: 0:57

Great. You were you were all over the country for like two and a half weeks. I don't even like a world traveler. typestyle.

Michael Cirillo: 1:04

You know, when you're gone for so long. And then that there's that moment you come back through the threshold of your own house and you feel like you're visiting your Yeah, you're like,

Kyle Mountsier: 1:13

when did I go on vacation? And well, why is the paint smell like it's a brand new house for some reason?

Michael Cirillo: 1:17

Yes. That was last night for me. I walked in, and I'm like, Am I allowed to take off my shoes? Can I?

Kyle Mountsier: 1:25

That's amazing. That's great. So you hanging out with Glen Lundy and Kentucky working on that 800% store? I think that's going to be a pretty cool thing.

Michael Cirillo: 1:34

Yeah, it's, it's all coming together. And there's lots of things we don't know that we don't know. And that's probably the exciting part of it, and just challenging everything we think we know about a dealership and saying, Well, how can we do it in a new and innovative way? So that's been fun to work on?

Kyle Mountsier: 1:51

Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of that, we've if you don't know, we've got a podcast called Auto Collabs. And it's a conversation that, Paul myself, Michael get to have with different thought leaders and industry partners and dealers across the country. And that is always a podcast that kind of challenges the norms of both storytelling, but also interaction with exactly what's going on the dealership we released yesterday, or two days ago, an episode with Keyshawn bats called The Future of financing, and all about like how financing might be, you know, leveraging technology to make it better for consumers. So speaking of what you don't know that you don't know, that's maybe one that you want to check out. So yeah. All right, let's get into it. First story here used vehicle wholesale prices experienced another decline in June continuing a downward trend observed over 22 months. Imagine that, according to Cox automotive, not adjusted price decreased 2.2% From May and were down 10% year over year. Retail sales assumptions from the CDK outages also had an impact on the market. And then the seasonally adjusted prices were down year over year as well. Here's a few of the data points, luxury vehicle prices dropped 9.9% SUVs, 9.3% compacts. 12%, mid size 11% pickups 8.3%. And here's the big trigger from the Cox automotive report that I love to talk about is the availability specifically a three year old vehicles decreased. And they're they're forecasting a 12% decrease in lease maturities in q3. That's a direct hit to us car inventories across the US and up to 17 to 18%. happening in q4. Jeremy Rob, Senior Director of economics and Industry Insights at Cox automotive said this is a pattern that is not going away for the next two years, and we'll likely be dealing with it through 2026. So the used car roller coaster is not over, Michael.

Michael Cirillo: 4:03

I think we need to can we just get the word out. Forget about the last three years. Pretended didn't exist. Don't get emotional about all the money that was to be made. Get used to having to do a lot more for a little bit less. That's just the season we're in right now. Yep. And it's gonna be okay. Lots of those second and third gen owners have lived through interesting times before so all of us fourth, maybe fifth Jenners, just know it's going to be okay, just get comfortable working a little bit harder.

Kyle Mountsier: 4:41

Yeah, I was actually talking to a dealer yesterday and their wholesale loss is up two months in a row. And when you think about what that means is it means that historically, we've been able to hold used cars a little bit longer, still be profitable or maintain, you know, net zero on wholesale. But now that you have, especially if you are wholesaling on a specific like 60 or 90 day turn, you got to watch out for wholesale losses. So it just demands a lot more out of your used car inventory right now, because of these declining prices, because of less lease maturities coming into the market holding higher price points. So it's just, it's just a thing where you have to be more strict with your use car inventory to maintain the profitability that you may have had over the last couple years. And to your point, like, kind of wipe it out of the window. It was an anomaly. And let's get tighter with how we operate in the used car side of the business. Yeah,

Michael Cirillo: 5:43

and you got to think like the customer's point of view, they're not, they're never and will never be like, you know, but if I turned on this lease that really helped the dealer. Yeah, hang on to it, they're going in higher prices on inflation, and interest rates, you know, even 50 cents filing a court filing to change his name due to inflation to 75 cents. He's like, Okay, I'm keeping this lease on this boot Gatti.

Kyle Mountsier: 6:15

On this, he's probably got a scoop it too, that's for sure. Speaking of consumer point of view, segue. I always find it interesting when much more consumer facing sites, not Automotive News, internal sites are talking about things going on specifically in auto and specifically for how they impact consumers. And a verge article this morning pointed out that Carvanha is now offering a it has now put a badge about the used car tax credit the $4,000 off. And they're obviously just like a lot of franchise dealers you're doing putting out on the hood of the car, applying for that tax incentive up front, and it was an entire article about how to look look for those vehicles, how to understand that tax credit, how why it's good to shop at Carvana, because of the opportunity on like they specifically pointed out some bolts pointed that are priced at 14,000, which means you could get them at up to 10,000 or at an up to $4,000 discount at 10,000 talked all about the education of how the tax filing actually gets a little bit more complicated, because you have to remember to pass that on to the dealer at the end of the year. So if you look at that you look at like Carvanha is now advertising that right in front of the consumer face, right, which means they're probably going to put that into the marketing. And you've got sub articles on larger broad scale, consumer facing media outlets talking about this as an opportunity. So as dealers, I think it's something that we need to be keenly aware of that is going to be pressure in the market.

Michael Cirillo: 8:01

And this is the whole point of marketing, you know, it's like, it's one of those things where we think marketing is run Google Ad get lead nanananana. And random. And marketing is about creating compelling and persuasive messages that encourage somebody to take a specific action. And so, you know, take take a page out of Carvana as book and do something that's in your own control and mark it actually do marketing. Yep, I get it, get your message out into your market, what I always think about, you know, especially for markets that Carvanha doesn't operate, or you can't see all of their stuff, you know, prominently or whatever, all that really matters is your own community. You know, I was at a I was at a dealer group the other day small, you know, probably in a market area of, I would say 100,000 all in and they've got, you know, six or seven, no, sorry, five or six stores that go along this river bend from about 45 minutes north to south. And I was having a conversation and the dealer said, you know, this is crazy. We've been here for seven, this is our seventh generation. Wow. Which means, which means people in this area knew about their dealership group before they had ever heard about dinosaurs. Right?

Kyle Mountsier: 9:26

Like, of course, it's like embedded in the community.

Michael Cirillo: 9:30

Yeah, like George Washington's fake teeth weren't even on display anywhere yet. When this dealership group started, what he said to me though, Kyle was like He goes, I just had a conversation with a customer the other day that didn't know we owned other dealerships, right. Wow. So my point is Carvanha is going to do what Carvanha does. What do you have that you can leverage to put your foothold on your market and become the mayor of your mark? Get figuratively speaking. And and nothing else matters like get integrated get integrated beyond the toy drive or the sponsoring the baseball team and I'm by the way, I'm not knocking those things I think keep doing those but do something more What's your message to drive people into you? Do they know that you exist to the degree that you need to be known?

Kyle Mountsier: 10:19

I always love to ask the question, Why does Coca Cola still buy billboards? Um, because it's important to share the message of coke over and over and every place that you possibly can be

Michael Cirillo: 10:34

interesting. But um, speaking of code, I don't know I don't have

Kyle Mountsier: 10:39

speaking of lots of places that people can be. You know, there's been a little bit of craziness surrounding the fact that getting into accounts is possible from hackers, and the level of account and detail in on scrutiny, the scrutiny of that from IT departments is at an all time high. You know, obviously, a lot of IT departments in in auto have moved to Microsoft branded products, because of the increased ability to kind of like manage those accounts. But recently, Google, who a lot of dealers and industry partners have moved to as their email and document storage place of choice has simplified the process for securing high risk accounts with what was what they've called their advanced protection program. It's been out for a while, but it's been a little tough to engage with. But now users can enroll in using just a passkey instead of the previously required to physical security keys. So a passkey, meaning like fingerprint, or face ID, or a device key Authentication Key. Originally, these two physical security keys were needed to activate and login through this advanced protection program. But now you can set up the program with a single passkey using all the biometric authentication available on like a Google Pixel and iPhone device. The setup is super streamlined, I actually have six Google accounts that I set up on my face ID this morning, within less than 10 minutes. So the authentication is easy to do, but also highly secure, just like face ID on your iPhone. And then you also have to provide like a recovery email, like a phone number email address, to enroll in the protection. So just like a PSA here, to make sure that if your company is on Google, that everybody is locking down their accounts as much as possible just to reduce the threat of security breaches.

Michael Cirillo: 12:44

You know what I just heard you say? I heard you say that it took you 10 minutes. You Kyle. Mountsier 10 minutes. So just for everyone else watching it's going to take us about an hour hear, can you imagine though I was thinking about this with the whole CD thing going on, that the IT people really took it on the chin, took it on the chin, right, like you walk into the office, if you were an IT person over the last three and a half, four weeks in automotive. Nobody said good morning to you. You you walked in, they all looked at you like this. You got it right. Yeah. Yeah. Look where you did. It was like everybody's fault by everybody's calling. For some reason. This makes sense. I mean, now wait a minute, didn't we didn't we interview? The guy that invented two factor authentication?

Kyle Mountsier: 13:46

Yeah, SSO to two factor or ortho basically for Google. Yeah. Ben I yet. Yeah, he was at Google when he did when he patented that.

Michael Cirillo: 13:56

We never did get his address, by the way to send him a gift.

Kyle Mountsier: 14:02

He's got it locked down behind security.

Michael Cirillo: 14:05

Yeah. Is two factor authentication just to get get into his property. Yeah, exactly.

Kyle Mountsier: 14:12

Hey, couple, a couple updates that might serve you today. Hope you enjoyed the show. Cirillo. We're going. Thank you so much for being on today. Thanks for hanging out with us. Hey, look, there's practical things that you can do to increase your business opportunity in your location today. It all starts with serving people. So

‍