I have discovered a way to keep customers happy and dealers selling cars. Make them cheaper! It sounds very simple but the best ideas usually are. From my research so far this month, dealers are still recording high demand for two distinct types of model; either in the small to mid size price range or late 6-18 month old cars. The smaller cars because people obviously tend to downsize in turbulent times and late plate cars because they just look such great value for money against new.
This doesn’t tell the whole story of course and there are daily reports of potential customers leaping with joy on discovering that they can actually afford the car of their dreams, only to have them dashed by the multi thousand pound loss on their trade-in.
There is however desire to buy and some dealers are getting customers coming in to look at finance deals purely off the back of the interest savings on their tracker mortgages. In some cases this has meant a saving of hundreds of pounds a month and customers are looking to use some of that to buy their next car.
This may be a simplistic look at the situation but dealers are selling cars, albeit mainly used cars but surely this will lead to major incentives on new cars and anyway if this isn’t the case everywhere it is just so nice to be able to report a glimmer of good news.
The market in general, in terms of new car registrations, is almost exclusively down but there are however two surprising exceptions to this trend – Jaguar and Volvo, which are 11% and 14% up year on year respectively. What are the reasons for this? It could be, in the Jags case, the massively popular new XF but may also be the renaissance of the X-Type, for years considered in the trade as a Mondeo with a different badge! With the Volvo the new R design models are sportier and have more mass appeal.
Whatever the reasons behind it it’s just great for MTI to relay some good news and some encouragement.
As we say in the trade; keep it simple – it’s a numbers game!
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