Surveys

Online finance tools are becoming increasingly important for used car dealers Used car retailing for some of the bigger players and small car specialists is doing quite well. According to dealer profitability specialist ASE the average UK motor retailer produced a strong performance in April, reflecting the upturn in the new car market and the continued strength in used car ...

Dealers have seen a surge in digital marketing over the past three years. Research carried out by CDK Global found that dealers are spending 64% of their marketing budget on digital tools, up from 45% in 2015. Some retailers, it said, were spending as much as 85%. A lot of this spend goes into online classified websites. The latest financials ...

Last year the newspapers were full of headlines on how the motor finance market was the next toxic shock set to hit banks and carmaker finance houses. The narrative went something like this. Dealers and finance houses were selling high value cars on Personal Contract Purchases (PCPs) using dodgy sales tactics and taking little or no account of the consumer’s ...

These are ambitious times for franchised dealer groups and large supermarkets, which are cranking up their used car operations to take advantage of a buoyant market. Pendragon is among those listed groups who have put more resources into their used car operations. It wants to double its used car revenues by 2021 and is intent on building a network of ...

It is often said that dealers are in the property business. And it’s true. Take Pendragon. By the close of 2017 it had £261.2m of land and property assets compared to £199.3m a year earlier. It also had property assets for sale of £11m. And during the last two years it has pumped £15.6m into buying property freeholds Vertu, too, ...

The Motor Trader Top 200 dealer groups turned in a record performance in 2017 with pre-tax profits up 9.9% to £1.07bn on turnover up 12.4% to a new high of £68.9bn. The average return on sales dipped from 1.3% to 1.24% during the year but the return on sales for the Top 25 dealer groups ranged from 2.1% to 5.8% ...

MotoNovo is pushing ahead with plans for its new FindAndFundMyCar website, which is due for launch in January 2018. Heading up the operation is Philip Morgan, a specialist in business to consumer website campaigns who was previously chief finance and operating officer at GoCompare, the insurance price comparison site. Morgan joined GoCompare initially as head of finance and risk and ...

The newly published Motor Trader Top 50 Independent Dealers survey tracks a sector in good health with combined turnover up 20% to £4.4bn. Turnover of the 43 companies in both the 2016 and 2017 MT Top 50s increased 17.2% and the entry point for the MT Top 50 rose from £10m to £17.5m. The MT Top 50’s average pre-tax profit ...

Auction houses are using their finance subsidiaries to help more dealers buy more vehicles at auction. The two leading remarketing companies in the UK are Cox Automotive and BCA Marketplace which compete head to head. Finance is a growing sector for both. Cox Automotive has its NextGear Capital wholesale funding arm and BCA Marketplace its BCA Partner Finance business. BCA ...

New car registrations fell -9.3% during the September plate-change to 426,170 units. This marked the sixth consecutive monthly fall and was the first time the all-important September market dropped since 2011, according to the SMMT. Year to date registrations were down -3.9% from 2,150,495 to 2,066,411 units as the levelling-off gathers pace. Retail registrations fell -8.8% in September to 223,777 ...