Decades ago, the traditional business of selling used cars was most well associated with dishonest car salesman pitching old rust-buckets in leisure suits to college students and high school teens. During the past two decades, dealerships began to understand the value of trade-ins and undertook efforts to revolutionize the perception.
The SEMA financial benchmarking program has been launched and is providing data for the industry. The focus this week is on jobbers/retailers. Following are a few nuggets gleaned from the responses for the month of January 2009.
Nearly 26% of responding jobbers/retailers say that they expect business to be up for the next three months compared to last year. We’ve heard from of number of industry executives that the first half of last year was pretty good. If that’s true and expectations come true, the first quarter of 2009 may be reasonably good.