Used-car market in ‘strange moment'

For the most part, shoppers coming to Dulles Motorcars accept that the vehicle they're trading in is worth a lot less now than it was just a few weeks ago.

"It's not like they don't have a spouse [working] in the basement of their house," said Jeremy Lustman, the Leesburg, Va., group's vice president of operations, alluding to the state and local orders keeping most Americans at home during the coronavirus pandemic. "I mean, they understand what's happening."

The pandemic that has brought the U.S. economy to a near halt has also made for an abrupt turnaround in the used-vehicle business, a part of auto retailing that franchised dealers have increasingly relied on in recent years. Retail used-vehicle sales and wholesale auction volumes have plunged. Vehicle values are down significantly in the span of just a few weeks. It's left dealers wrestling with how to handle trade-ins and at what volumes to stock their lots in the coming weeks.

As recently as February, dealers answering an Automotive News survey said they saw the biggest opportunity for profit growth in their used-vehicle departments. Auto retailers of all kinds — franchised dealers and online upstarts such as Carvana — had been eagerly trying to buy consumers' vehicles to build their inventories so they could capitalize on a hot market.

Now, many dealers are approaching trade-ins with caution, given collapsing retail demand and dropping wholesale prices.

"I went through this in 2008, and 2001, but it's way worse now," New York dealer Todd Caputo said, referring to disruption during the Great Recession and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "Because back then there was still some liquidity. You could still get some buyers for cars or get some bidders for cars at the wholesale auction."

Caputo shut down his four Sun Auto Group stores in the Syracuse area March 19, just ahead of an order by the state. Since April 1, he's been selling vehicles online.

But there is little activity in the market.

For the week ended April 12, wholesale auction volume totaled just 19,000, an 83 percent drop from the pre-virus weekly average, according to J.D. Power. Retail used-vehicle sales during the first 12 days of April for franchised dealers tumbled 63 percent vs. the same period in 2019. J.D. Power now forecasts used-vehicle prices to fall 7 percent through June before beginning to recover — though Jonathan Banks, vice president of vehicle valuations and analytics, notes the outlook is fluid and contingent on a gradual recovery in the back half of the year.

Still, used-vehicle prices at retail as of mid-April are off by just 1 percent, while wholesale values are estimated to be down 10 to 12 percent, said Cox Automotive executive Dale Pollak. It's an odd gap.

"Generally speaking, there's a correlation between the movement of wholesale and retail pricing," said Pollak, Cox executive vice president and co-founder of vAuto inventory- and market-tracking software. "But we're at a strange moment in time where we're not seeing that correlation."

One reason could be dealers remain optimistic the economy will reopen soon and so have mostly held steady on retail prices. Some may be leery of marking down vehicles acquired at pre-pandemic prices.

Pollak sees it as an opportunity for dealers willing to mark vehicles down to sell for cash that can be used to acquire fresh inventory at discounted prices.

Caputo, of Sun Auto Group, said a "nightmare scenario" for any dealer would be to think vehicles are still worth pre-outbreak values and then bury themselves in trades they can neither retail nor wholesale for a profit.

That gets to a point of frustration for many dealers: Used-vehicle values, while certainly dropping, are tough to pin down with such little activity in the retail and wholesale markets.

"All of us have seen stronger new-vehicle sales than used over the last month, which is totally opposite as to the way the year started," Maroone USA CEO Mike Maroone told Automotive News' "Daily Drive" podcast. "And at this point, I don't think any of us really know ... what the right values are on used vehicles."

Maroone said he sees a "tremendous amount of risk" in today's used-vehicle market and suspects dealers will absorb "significant losses."

"So as much as we want to sell a lot of new vehicles and take trades and buy used vehicles, how we balance that used-vehicle valuation is going to be really tough," he added.

Cox Automotive, which owns auction giant Manheim, acknowledges that the abrupt drop in activity has thrown a wrench into its Manheim Market Report, a guide to used-vehicle values.

The company has sought to rectify the uncertainty with a new daily retention guide that advises dealers how the market is changing in these volatile times.

"We are advising clients to adjust MMR by the retention rate to get an estimate of what it takes to sell in today's wholesale marketplace," Cox Automotive Chief Economist Jonathan Smoke said in a market update this month.

Still, some dealers have noted that, with so few vehicles being wholesaled, values could be skewed even using the retention-guide formula.

Lance Knopp, general manager at Bob Price Auto Group in Fredericksburg, Texas, said online sales are off about 75 percent and floor traffic has been nonexistent. Knopp remains optimistic that business will pick up by the end of the year but acknowledges "it's definitely not the year we thought we were going to have."

Even before franchised dealers looked to 2020 as a banner year for used-vehicle sales, they made their used-vehicle departments an increasingly crucial part of their businesses as profit margins on new-vehicle sales narrowed and customers struggling to afford new vehicles shifted to the used market.

The National Automobile Dealers Association's annual dealership financial profiles show the average franchised dealership's used-to-new vehicle sales ratio grew to 85 percent in 2019, meaning it sold 85 used vehicles for every 100 new. That was up from 80 percent in 2018 and 77 percent in 2017.

Cascade Auto Group in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, had record sales in January and February and was in the early thralls of the spring boost when the virus halted momentum, said dealer principal Pat Primm. Cascade is now approaching both trade-ins and the wholesale market with caution but is still preparing for pent-up demand.

"Is it going be record-breaking when they reopen the economy? Maybe not," Primm said. "But if it is, we certainly want to be ready."

Cascade's used-car manager will strategically buy cars to prepare for that day. But, Primm noted, "we're not going hog wild."