You don’t need me to tell you, but getting hold of decent used car stock is never easy.
In fact, it’s something I spend the majority of my time on when it comes to the Clever Car Collection. It’s not really about the sales, although they’re really important, it’s about buying good quality used cars.
I’ve been told a thousand times now that running a successful used car operation is about ‘buying them right’ and that means getting them at a price you can sell with a bit of margin and as little prep as possible.
My usual buying channels are the online auctions like Motorway and Carwow and occasionally some private ads fishing. But occasionally I get an offer from another dealer who has a part exchange they don’t want.
Recently I got a call from our good friend Mike Brewer with exactly that. When he’s not talking about buying and selling cars on Wheeler Dealers, you can find him at one of his used car dealerships – and more often than not that means his latest venture, One Automotive.
The Warwick-based used car and van business was started with his partner James Elkington and his wife Michelle and now takes up a huge amount of his time. He clearly loves it too and when I went to visit for a walkaround video recently, his passion for the business was obvious.
A couple of weeks ago I got a video message from Brewer offering me a car for sale. He’d taken in a 15-plate Hyundai i30 diesel. The customer had part exchanged that and a Ford Ranger for one of Brewer’s vans and the i30 wasn’t for him.
‘I’m trying to move my stock age profile up a bit, we want newer stuff and this was just a little bit too old for us,’ he told me.
‘This looks perfect for you!’
He was right. Helpfully I was in Manchester seeing Auto Trader for an account review and some tips on improving my advertising. I’d got a lift there from a colleague so was able to drop by on the way back to pick the car up.
Brewer had given the car a bit of a clean for me in advance as the previous owners had dogs and he said he was too embarrassed to hand it over in that condition… even to me.
The car was great and I drove it the 100-odd miles back to Gosport with no problems. I do like a good Korean car for used car stock.
Picking the car up gave me a good opportunity to catch up with Brewer about the motor trade too. We’ve been a bit quiet at CCC HQ recently. I’m told it’s the time of year, but it feels painfully slow.
This year we’ve turned cars over pretty quickly – our average days to sell up until now has been 17 days – but as the weather turned, it felt like our leads were switched off and it’s been pretty dry ever since.
Brewer said he wasn’t experiencing similar issues so as I kicked the tyres of the Hyundai he gave me some tips on what to do. You can watch that and see what the Hyundai is like in the AI Car Dealership Project update at the top of this post.
