State of the Used-Car Industry: Remarketing

For 54 consecutive weeks, there was neither a car nor a car dealer that passed through the lanes of McConkey Auction Group’s DAA Seattle or DAA Northwest locations in Washington state — which was the “initial epicenter” of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.

But after closing completely for two months and re-opening in the second week of May 2020 with all-digital sales, what Bob McConkey saw in the marketplace gave him confidence.

“What I discovered then was that, the last 15 years of my investment into the auction business with technology, with the quality of condition reports, and so forth, that when we opened, all of these customers that told me they would never buy digitally, bought digitally because we couldn’t give them a choice and we had good inventory,” said McConkey, MAG chief executive officer and president, in an interview from late May of this year.

“And so, we became a digital marketplace, in the physical space, with live auctioneers 100% simulcast. And what I saw was that I became very rapidly really optimistic that the industry’s probably going to be thrust forward four years in three months, in terms of the mentality of the buyer and the seller.”

Both DAA Northwest and DAA Seattle resumed in-person live auction sales in early April of this year.

And while the in-lane sale re-openings industrywide have varied from auction to auction, state to state, one consistency is this: the auction and remarketing business looks different than it did a year-and-a-half ago, thanks to a shift online that was not started, but certainly accelerated, by COVID-19.

To see how, read “The State of the Used Car Industry” whitepaper, which can be purchased on Cherokee Media Group’s Intelligence & Insights page here.

NOTE: The whitepaper is free for CMG Premium subscribers. More information on CMG Premium subscriptions can be found here.