Asbury Automotive Group Inc. became a bona fide giant in 2021 after acquisitions led by its $3.2 billion deal for Larry H. Miller Dealerships and its finance-and-insurance products provider Total Care Auto.

Asbury ranks No. 5 on the Automotive News list of the top 150 dealership groups based in the U.S., with retail sales of 109,910 new vehicles in 2021. Through the first nine months of 2022, it already had sold 114,368 new vehicles, meaning it is likely now the No. 3 dealer behind Lithia and AutoNation. 

Asbury not only completed an impressive series of acquisitions, it managed to quickly and successfully integrate what amounts to a doubling in store and employee counts this year.

“It’s a credit to the team that I work with,” said Asbury CEO David Hult, 57. He said Asbury also seeks properties it thinks it will mesh with.

Asbury sold two Lexus dealerships and five Toyota stores over six weeks earlier this year — a painful, unwanted but necessary move to regain compliance with automaker store-count limits. The online sales platform Clicklane was extended to all Asbury locations bought since the software’s initial rollout earlier in 2021. Hult estimates Asbury will finish all software networking integration by year end. This fall, Asbury began to expand Total Care Auto F&I products to legacy stores.

Hult said Asbury felt it had moved quickly integrating the new properties, but he noted it also took the first six months slowly “trying to get to know each other and build trust.” 

Asbury has paid off its purchases to the point it is ready to grow some more. The Larry H. Miller acquisition and other 2021 fourth-quarter deals took the group’s debt ratio from 1.2 to 2.7 times earnings. But by the end of June, Asbury had slashed its debt down to 2.1 times adjusted EBITDA — low enough for it to re-enter the buy-sell market, Hult said this summer. By Sept. 30, it had cut debt to 1.9 times earnings. The company is looking for new deals but also considering stock buybacks, according to Hult.

And Asbury is gunning for further growth. In April, Asbury raised its 2025 revenue goal by 60 percent to $32 billion — a number more than three times its $9.84 billion 2021 revenue. However, Hult said Asbury’s ultimate goal isn’t to reach a certain store count.

“It’s to be really great partners with our manufacturers, to have our employees really feel ... there’s a lot of alignment between how they think and feel and [how] we do as far as operating the business, and someone to sit back and say, ‘Wow, they have really great stores and good people,’ ” Hult said. “So, whatever size that takes us to, that’s great.”