#127 - Wholesale Buying At Retail Prices with Jasen Rice

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Independent Dealer Podcast. This week we are speaking with Jason Rice. We cornered him in owner operator of lotpop Inventory Consulting. All things. This episode is great. It's super timely. We talk everything about auction pricing, how to price your cars strategically and psychologically. We talk about how many you should be buying based on your sales cycle.

Luke, I'll tell you, this is great information. Two week sales cycle. That's what everybody needs to look at and go to google.com trends and see what's going on in the market. Cause it's there. It's great. Jason, thanks for the advice and thanks for being with us.

Thank you.

You are listening to the Independent Dealer podcast with hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson. Thank you so much for tuning in. Let's do this.

All right, Jason, thank you again so much for being here. Let's just get into it. Tell me a little bit. You're the guy, you've got your pulse on the used car market, the supply of inventory, things like that. Give me kind of Your overall, your 10,000 foot view. What do you see happening out there in the wholesale markets? All I hear is dealers just prices are too high, prices are too high, prices are too high. Is that the new normal or do you think this is kind of a blip?

Yeah, I mean I think guys are getting excited because there is, there's been good traffic either led by lack of new car availability and new car sales or stimulus money or things like that, but or downtime some people happen to have. And so dealerships and I find this happen pretty much yearly. The traditional trends would be January, basically February, March and a little bit of April where the peak seasons half of April. By mid April, spring hits, things start shutting down a little bit. May and June slows down. So the traditional sales cycles and shopper was always kind of by mid February, things are really busy. March was great and that lasts to about mid April in a 60 day window. Then it starts slowing down. And what we found was a lot of guys end of March and the beginning of April were still buying in bulk and paying top money for these cars. And then come into April, going into May or June sometimes depending on seasonal and where that market is. All of a sudden these guys are left holding the bag when the market shipped and they're like, man, somebody shut the faucet off. So we're seeing that, but it's transitioned forward a bit in time because we're a lot of people were shut down. April, March and April and a little bit of May and stuff. So we're just seeing that now. So guys are and so always our dealerships, we always tell them to start slowing down about beginning of mid April to not over buy over anxious because we know the market shift and when it was coming and we'll stay steady to their sale rate. That was real important. We look at what they're carrying to what they're selling. Carrying 100, we're selling 100 plus.

So.

So if your sales cycle's still running in the last two weeks, we look at a two week sale rate, then we go back and we continue to fill that void and buy. If not, if it's slowing down then we slow down with it. So I think that's what we're seeing right now is guys still had strong months and really things are starting to slow down. Shopper counts. If you look at like Google trends and typed in used cars, the shopper counts down, volume's down. If you look at like car global stats, volumes down. But the big difference is and what I like about the car global, it's K A R car global. They have a used car dashboard and you can look at each state is even though sales are down, inventory listing levels are down. So there's still a seller's market where.

We can ask more.

So dealers grosses are good. They're able to ask a little bit more for cars even though they're selling less. So that's where I think they think because sales are down. Man, if I just had more cars, I could sell more cars, which maybe could happen. And so that's why everybody's, you know, running this lane, trying and driving up that demand and at some point in.

Time this bubble is going to burst.

Yeah, that's Jason. That's my fear that we're all out here, not all of us, but you know, if you right now, if we're trying to get inventory, it feels like we're paying, you know, out the book. We're paying almost retail for products that we know should be 4 to $5,000 less than what we're paying. When how can a dealer know or you know, how can we know when that bubble is going to burst? I mean is there something that could lead us to that direction?

Well, I was just on a call this morning with the dealership and the dealer is always involved in the call and there's about eight or ten other team members there and we're changing prices and while we're changing prices, he, the buyer, the deal was buying some cars. He's like hey guys, since we've done a few price changes, I already bought six cars. So I asked him and of course he couldn't really tell me. But you know, my question is, well, is it becoming easier to buy? And so is that a kind of a red flag all of a sudden you're able to start buying more than you're typically. So does that mean things are slowing down and guys aren't running to the lane? So I'd watch, you know, that availability and seeing if it's getting a little. And I've seen a couple Facebook posts, guys saying, hey guys, you know, yeah, it's still tough right now, but you're starting to be able to buy cars. Okay.

Right.

You know, if you really hunt for them. So once you start seeing those, that kind of cycle on top of your two week sale rate, dropping off. You know, one of the things, I put a quote out today, cause I heard it in a podcast about Warren Buffett. He says, you know, be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy. So if guys are still up there at the lane, I'd be a little bit. And it's stepping all over. I'd be a little bit fearful. But as soon as things start, you want to be a buyer at the, you know, just like stock market, if it crashes, you want to be the one with cash so you can start buying it because you know it's coming back up, right? Yeah, you always want to be a buyer at current market positions. And I think that's the cycle we're running into right now. You know, if I was a dealership.

Yeah.

And again, maybe I typically sell 100 and I'm really only selling 90, but my inventory is clean. I'm making good gross instead of pushing it and trying to get back to 100 or more and thinking you're missing this bubble. I just stay at my current clean pace because here's the thing, we know winter months and if you think about it, what I would call winter months is October. You're only 60 bit less than 60 days from October if you have a 60 day supply or we've tried to have a 30 day supply. But I'm just saying, I mean the next 45 days you better be clean, lean and clean. And this winter is probably going to be worse than what they always been because we got election in November too. You got to throw into that mix.

So Jason, that's interesting. You're, I guess you're a 12 turn guy. Is that where you want to be all the time.

Well, and I want to make sure, I want to make this clear. Gross and volume is possible. Okay. So yes. So I'm not talking about the sheer volume. Drop your price, move the inventory, make it up with volume. Yes. If I got 100, we're selling 100.

But we do that with gross.

And what we push is what we call First 30. I got little wristbands we give to dealers, say First 30. What I found over the years, it's been 15 years now, helping dealers, the dealers that have gross in volume, they do 60 to 70% of their sales in the first 30 days. We all know the biggest gross potential on a car because it's typically a depreciating asset. I say typically because cars are holding pretty strong right now, but it's a depreciating asset. And we know the best time to make the most money is when it's fresh. So if you just increase the amount.

Of fresh cars you sell, your gross.

Is going to come. Yeah, so we can't have age, you know, to do 60. And what I like about when we push first 30 is it's a trickle down effect because in order to get 60 to 70% of your sales in the first 30 days, you can't have 30, 40% of your inventory aged because it won't happen then. If you've got to get 60 to 70% of your sales in the first.

30 days, you got to get your.

Turnaround time, your transportation, your service, your photos, detail. All that's got to be humming and buying cycles, you know, so it's kind of A Focusing on first 30, trying to get 60 at least 50, but 60 to 70% of your sales in the first 30 days, that forces you to focus downhill on all these other things.

Jason, I've noticed that I'd like to be at nine turn. That's where I like to be. I feel comfortable with that. I mean to buy here, pay your space, I think it's a little different. You can get too fast. But in the last 90 days I've been 12 turn, 12 turn. And I've gotten to this point where I'm, I'm selling more cars and I can stop. And is there a point where a dealer can get too fast? It sounds like you, you say that and do you see people getting too fit too fast right now on there?

Now I want to clarify when we, when I'm talking about turn, it's not like a lot of guys use systems like V Auto, Max Digital and stuff. And those systems use your average Age as your turn number.

Yeah.

Okay, so if your average age is 30, then you're turning 12 times. But that's not the case because that means you got 50 in stock, you're selling 50. Well no, most guys there's 50 and they're 12 turn. Because I can, I can fluctuate that number by going and buying 10 fresh one day old car. All of a sudden I go from 12 turns because my average age is 30, I go let's have 50 cars. I go buy 10 tonight, throwing 10 one day old cars into my inventory. Well, my average age just dropped from 30 down to 25. Now my turn goes from 12 to 14 and I look like a. But that's not the case. So when I talk turn, it's actual. If you got 50, sell 50. What I call sold turn. We do a lot ready turn. Also I'm gonna not only look at if we got 50 in stock, but how many are fully photoed ready for sale turn. So if I have 50 in stock, I might only have 35 fully photoed ready for sale. And so what am I turning there? So a lot of dealers might have 50 in stock, but selling 40 go, well shit, I'm not selling my 50. Well, if you only have 35 fully photoed for sale and you're selling 40, you know, you're still turning your lot ready 13 times. The difference is you need to get your pictures done right, you need to get your photos done. So you got a turnaround time problem. So anyways, when I talk turn, it's that. So yes, at some point in time I think once you get to that 18 to 20 range, you're turning too fast. So when you do that, you got one or two things. You can either raise your prices because you're too cheap or, or you throw more inventory at it. My bet usually let's throw more inventory.

At it.

Because other than maybe your buy here, pay here where you can maybe raise your pricing, but because again you're not worried about online displaying and being two grand higher than everybody else and no one calling you or emailing you, if you've got foot traffic and you're putting them on cars, you might.

Be able to do it that way.

But it right now it's gonna be hard to throw more inventory at the problem right this second. So I mean, you advising people to up prices when you see this or no.

Well, the hard part is, is the bank calls too, right? I mean you can only raise it so much.

Yeah.

If you got a, you know, answer to A bank and an approval number. So then you gotta either have cash down, which probably may or may not happen with, you know, the stimulus money and things like that. But are you finding with your buy here payer, is it easier to get cash now?

Yeah, I mean, we probably had the best five month run of down payment we've ever had. How about you, Jeff?

Yeah, it's been good.

And I know we all know Luke.

Sells his cars too cheap. So that's. We've covered that in podcasts in the past. So that might be the silver bullet for you, Luke. Charge what you should be charging. And speaking of Jason, I know I saw a video you posted a little while ago. If you guys don't follow Jason, do it because he puts out a bunch of great stuff on this. But what, tell me your pricing strategy. Could we cover that just real quick? I mean, I don't know if that's. Well, it's not traditional, right? Because it's not what I do. And when I watch your video, I was like, man, that makes a lot of sense.

You mean like flat pricing, the 20 grand stuff? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it was almost, what was it, probably 2000. It's been about nine, 10 years ago. When I was Fieros teaching a dealer, he had a car like at 12, 2. And I was like, man, let's put this thing down to 11, 9, because we're missing anybody going online saying, hey, I want a car, but I don't want to spend more than 12 grand. So being at 12, 2, he was missing somebody capping out at 12. I told him to go to 11 9. And then I stopped myself and said, hold on, what if we put it at 12 grand even? He's like, what are you talking about? I said, well, if we put it at 12,000 even, we might get the guy looking 12 or less, but we also might get the shopper looking 12 to 15 or something like that. So he says, you think it works? I'm like, I don't know. So we started playing with the handful of his cars. We put a 999 car to 10 grand. We put a 12, you know, 11, nine to 12 and 14 nine to 15 grand. And we played with a few cars. Then I started doing research on like pricing strategies. And I come to find out, I'm like, man, we're more of a marketing person than a used car manager now. You know, to traditional used car manager, you think of closer and somebody that's, you know, meeting and greeting and putting them in cars and closing them Right now we just need to as a used car manager, expose our cars as many people as possible. That's why we bought cars in the busiest. Our lot is usually on the busiest intersection of town. So we got the drive by traffic. So my job now is to get that car in front of anybody. So what we found was. And so I started researching marketing strategies and pricing strategies. Find things like buy one, get one free, buy one, get one half off, things like that. And what we do is what we call Psychological Pricing.9999. We want them to psychologically round down. They say in the stats about 50% people around down. The rest of the people are smart enough and round up and say it's 10 grand and not 999. Anyways. So we do psychological pricing. I think it costs us gross one. I'll explain that in a minute why it does. But two people, 999 works on radio, print, TV. If somebody sees my ad in the print, they go oh nine, nine, you know, nine grand. If they hear it 999, they it works. But if they go online, which people do now, and they end up on some of these sites, even your own website, but let's say you are an AutoTrader, Cars.com, carGurus or any of these other sites, they might shop 10 to 15 grand if they don't see your 999 car.

So it doesn't work anymore. All right?

So you're out of the, you're out of the bucket. So by pricing it at 10 grand, you do get the 10. The person that says hey, I want a car but I can't spend more than 10. But boom, there you are, just like the 999 person. But then you also get the person that says hey, I want a car, but I know I want something decent so I want to spend 10 to 15. You're there too. Sometimes that car performs better for the 10 and higher shopper. Because when they go 10 to 15 they might sort low to high and you get better exposure. The reason. So you're going to maximize your exposure, get your cars in front of many people as possible doing it one. The other reason why I think it costs you gross is think about 999. The reason why we do that is people to mentally round down, they're going to think nine.

All right?

So think of your first pencil. You go at 999 doc, taxes negative equity. Your first pencil bite might be 11,273. And they go oh shit. What's that? Yeah, you know, that's way too high.

I thought I was nine.

Yeah.

And they go. And I go, what are you thinking, folks? Well, I was thinking nine. Can I really go to them and say, well, where'd you come up with that number? Yeah, I psychologically set you up. So, you know, if you say. If you put it at 10 and they go, I was thinking nine, I could say, well, where'd you get that number? Well, I found cheaper ones out there. Oh, you mean the one for 9995 that's blue instead of black. Can I match this price and earn your business? You know, you get.

You get.

You got ways to at least overcome that. So I think psychological pricing costs us gross. When you think about that pencil and then two, you're going to maximize exposure. So to me, I wouldn't price cars any other way.

You know, I was. I was sitting in 20 group. This has been five or six years ago. And Joe Lascota was arguing with all of us about the, you know, 999 or 999.95. What, you know, whatever that logic was. And he said the exact same thing. You're costing yourself gross. He said, I want everybody to go home and raise your prices $5 or $1, whatever it is, to get to that even number. And it's really hard for car dealers to figure that out. You know, I can't imagine what you went through when you first tried to do this, but you actually think about it. It works great.

Yeah. And so we did.

So I. I've been doing car sales since 97. I was doing Internet sales since 97 and 98. So I was doing. Selling cars off the Internet. And so I was always kind of myself as somebody stays ahead of the curve. And I blew my mind. I'm like, this is so easy. How did no one think about this? And so I ran to Dale Pollack, who's the founder of V Auto. I went to our vp. I'm like, you got. You can't. You got to understand what I just figured out here. Because after we did a handful of cars for that one dealership, the next month, we transferred all his cars over to flat pricing. Because it was half a month of June that we played with some cars. The whole month of July, we flipped everything to flat pricing. And as SRPs and VDPs is quadrupled, I mean, went from 100 per car to 300 per car. And we're like, holy crap, how did no one think about this? So Simple. So V Auto did a study, we started actually introducing some dealers and yeah, they validated through AutoTrader because back then auto trader just acquired us and we're running through all those stats and it was validated that these. Yeah, I mean it works again just go do.

And then the other thing, go do.

This, go look at private sellers. Think about this. So weed99995 like you said, it's 100 year old strategy. I got old ads in here from magazines showing how we priced cars at 29.95 when they first, you know, back in the day. It's just an old strategy, it's hard to overcome and so yeah, it's ingrained in us. But think about this now people shop.

By online and they're going to say.

Especially during a recession, they're very budget oriented. They're going to say hey I only got eight grand, only got 250amonth. You know, so what does that buy me? It buys me, you know, 8 to 10 grand. So they're going to look very budget wise by their money. We talk that way. Hey, you got, when's the last time you appraised a car for 99.95, right? Hey, I got a 10 grand trade, I'll sell you mine for 15, right? We talk that way, we appraise that way. And if you go look at private sellers, go to Craigslist, go to Autotrader and I'll tell you about at least 60% of private sellers put their own car price at like a flat number. A fight within $500 ranges, usually 6507 grand 85. So people price their own cars that way. We talk that way, they search that way. We you know, so why we hold on to 100 year old strategy.

So I know you talked about this a second ago about the difference in somebody searching from ten grand and up. How much of an overlap did you see from the people shopping or getting. If you price your car at $10,000, how many more people did it or how many more views did your car get because of that?

Oh, I mean back when we first.

Started this, I mean thousands. I can show you charts where they had maybe nine, you know, maybe 100 SRPs on that car. And I mean we had 130 day old cars at 9995 or a truck and we raised it five bucks to 20 grand. It went from like 100 SRPs to like 900 SRPs per day. But that was back before when these sites algorithms were the default Search was price high to low. So back then, if somebody did say 10 to 15, and I was at 15 grand, I was above the 14. Nine, nine, nine. And then anybody said 15 to 20 grand and sorted it low to, you know, we.

So now they do different algorithms.

Like, you know, they. The best matches and most relevant or best deals. So you don't see as huge of a spike due to those algorithms. But people do search by price point, so it's still relevant. If you, if you get what I mean. You know, before it really just. I mean, it blew up. I got charts.

Yeah.

I mean, some of these cars just. And so the car that was 150 days old, we raised it five bucks. It sold in seven days. You know, and what I. That's what I found out. That 1995 car did better for the 20 and higher than the 20 and lower on some cars. Unless you're miley, because get it, the person that says, hey, I want to buy a truck, but I can't spend more than 20 grand.

Well, even, even at 19,995 or 20.

Grand, I'm the very top of their budget. They might click on the car, but they go, oh man, nice truck, but still at the top of my budget. If they can find an 18 or 17 grander, they're gonna buy that one instead because 20 is the top. But that other person that says, hey, I'll spend 20 to 25 grand and they look low to high and I got decent miles. Boom. Then it buys. And I proved that. I have charts from real estate agent that prices their houses flat. He went from 150, 150 grand. House had a ton of searches, had a ton of appointments. He dropped at five grand of 145 and his searches dropped. His appointments dropped because again, the people that said, hey, I don't want to spend more 150 grand on the house, 145 was still right up there at the top of the budget. He missed the 150 to 200 shopper, the 150 to 175 shopper. So, yeah, it's. It's one thing to hear about the strategy and debate it. It's another thing to understand it. You know, 22 grand works on Cargurus and Autotrader. It doesn't work on cars.com. 25 grand works great on cars.com maybe not CarGurus, but also Auto Trader. So it depends on what sites you're listening at in the frequencies of the numbers and what works where. So you Start moving. Yeah, it's a deeper dive than just flat price.

Hey, everybody. Sorry to interrupt the podcast, but Luke and I, we've been working on the independent Dealer podcast for probably two years. We finally strong armed a company into being our sponsor, which means we can keep putting this episode out. We can push it to more dealers. Luke can find a phone that doesn't sound like that. And we got Dealer Re to sign up with us. Luke, who's Dealer Re?

Dealer Re is my insurance reinsurance provider. They should be yours, and I know they're yours as well. Jeff, I've been with dealer re since 2011, and let me tell you, there's no finer people out there than Taylor Byrd and Tim Byrd and just the whole company, they've taken care of me. And I've said this before, Jeff, but the number one best decision I made in the car business is starting my reinsurance company.

Yep. Listen to episode 19. We get into reinsurance pretty deep and call the birds over at Dealer Re.

Sounds good, Luke.

Here we are, back to the episode.

What you said, something about, you know, and I brought this up a couple times lately about transportation and how, you know, that has to be filtered into your, you know, how long it takes to get your car ready. What have you seen dealers lately doing to, I guess thinking outside the box, cars transported. Because that's been a real issue for.

A lot of dealers. Sorry.

Taking a drink. You know, the. I think they're buying more local.

So to overcome that, I mean, shoot, I had that problem. I bought a lease and a Volvo, and I bought it from one of our clients who's not in state. He had to do locate, which was out of state. And the car was supposed to come on a Sunday, then it got moved to a Monday, then it got moved to a Wednesday. And so that was very frustrating. So the more. I always said wholesale was a global, it's a national because guys would buy in Chicago, would buy in Florida. The guys in Florida buy in Texas. The guys in Texas would be buying North Carolina, you know, so the wholesale market was national and even global. People from Russia's buying black Mercedes and shipping them over there, you know, so wholesale was always a national, the global market. Well, with the Internet it was. And retail was more local market, if not regional. Meaning. Yeah, no one's driving two, four hours for focus, but they'll drive, you know, four or five, six hours for that. Hard to come by, you know, Mustang, Cobra, whatever. So. So it's local, regional at best. And so what's happening, guys? Would go to the lane in Kansas City buying cars, and they're 10 grand. I can't sell this for 10 grand. Who the hell is paying for this? Well, it's a guy in New York that can sell it for 13. By the time he transport, you know, he can. So he's driving up your local market. So what you're buying at the lane is irrelevant to what you can sell at your local market. So now I think that shift is happening for a little bit because, yeah, guys are realizing, because they're coming more efficient. Like you said, you used to turn nine, now you're turning 12. You're becoming more efficient. So you're finding, oh, crap, I need to get these cars turned around faster. Shoot, they're selling before I even get them on the lot. So those, those cracks in the pavement are being exposed now. And so I can't go buy in New York now because it's gonna take me two weeks just to get the car. And shit, by the time I do that, it's gonna be 30 days old. And I need the car now. So I'm just gonna buy local. And so that transition is gonna happen, and it may happen for the next. And it has been happening for the next few months. And. And that's another reason why I think guys are making it. It's tougher for people to buy cars, and that's why it's making it easier for these bigger companies to do it. Because they'll do it.

Yeah, they don't care. They'll just pay whatever.

Yeah. And plus, when you go, hey, I got a hundred cars for you, transport company to pick up, you're gonna get bumped on the list maybe, and, you know, you're gonna get taken care of a little bit better than somebody.

I feel like for me, one of the best kind of canary in the coal mines is those institutional buyers, right? Those guys, the scarecrows that are just in the lane paying anything for cars. Those decisions come down from corporate, right? So you have 500 buyers. CarMax, Carvana, Carhop, JD by Rider, all those guys that you see bidding against each other and pushing those prices up, they get the corporate signal to buy. They also get the corporate signal to not buy or to ease up. And it seems like so many of those guys probably use the same philosophy and strategies. They see Google searches going down, they see their sales going down. They see lot traffic reducing. They see their, you know, inventory starting to swell. And so they kind of pull those reins in all together. Is that, you know, kind of what we can gauge on.

Now here's what I see because you.

Got the carbonas and who's the newest one that just went public like rumors.

There'S another one coming that's I think.

It'S called shift or something like that that's going to try to go public because they see the demand. And here's the thing, these companies accept a loss. They're new, they're innovative, they're, you know, think everybody can, oh, Carvana's not going to last. They keep losing money hand over. They're fine with, you know, I'm a, I'm a business owner. I know sometimes I'm going to try to break even or lose a little because I'm reinvesting in the company. And when I'm trying to satisfy investors.

They want to see growth.

You know, they're fine with losing money because it's just launching. So they're fine to pay 95 or 100% price to market. They don't care because they'll take the losses because they're trying to satisfy showing that they can gain market share. So they're not going away and they're not going away with putting their hands down anytime soon either because they're fine with driving up. So as the more and more of these companies come public, they need inventory and they're fine with losses because they're going to take it and try to make it up on F and I or somewhere else and go hey guys. Yeah, we lost 10 million this year but we grew 40% in sales. Okay. So there's, there's a business here. We just got to figure out that shift and until that normalizes which will be years. Yeah, it's not going to. That's why I tell dealers just they're not going away. So either you stop complaining about having.

Wall street shuts them off.

Yeah. So either shut, you got to shut up. One, make sure your appraisal process, if you're a new car franchise, a little bit easier to say this but make sure your appraisal process is right. Making sure you're fine tuned with everything you're doing internally to acquire cars by private sellers to service lane to appraisals on new car deal. Make that right before you bitch about the lane. And then two, you know, don't buy it then don't pay too much and let somebody else sell the freaking car because they will and they'll gobble you up and they don't care. It's like Walmart. If you're a little mom and Pop and Walmart moves down the street. You know, you better make adjustments or you're out of business soon and you buy more product and be more competitive with your price or Walmart stealing your business. So you know, as soon as a Carvana, Carmax or any of these and then you got the big large dealer groups like the Autonations and Sonics and everybody else, they're still gonna, they can stretch and fight with those guys because yeah, they'll have algorithms and say, hey, I know we had to pay up, but it moves better in Texas. So move these batch over there and then move these to Chicago and move these down to Florida and then they'll just cycle cars through. So the smaller guys, yeah, it's gonna be a tough battle because they're not going away. Great.

Jason, what can you say, what can you tell us right now that we should be doing to wrap this thing up? What should dealers be doing to price their cars right when they have to pay too much? What should we doing right now?

OAK?

Well, that's easy for me to say. It's easier for me to say because we watch this data daily when we look at dealers inventory. So we look at, I would look at a two week sales cycle and stocking strategy. Don't look 30 and 45 day metrics. Think about it. In mid April, in the middle of a shutdown, if you're trying to stock for your inventory during a shutdown, you look 45 days ago going hey, we sold 100 cars 45 days ago, let's keep buying. Well, no, you're in the middle of a shutdown. Same thing happened now. Even though your volume is moving up and you're back to selling 100 cars, if you're starting to drop off, don't look 45 days ago because you're booming 45 days ago. Even though we're going in a slower. So look at two week sales cycles. We do a two week sales cycle then average it out for the month. So if I sold 10 in two weeks, that's 20. Okay, so I got 30 in stock. And so either I need to increase my sales or decrease it. And then I gotta make a price adjustments based off of that. So if my price is high and I'm still selling, I sold 20 in two weeks, I got 40 in stock. So I sold 20 in two weeks. 40 in stock, I'm on pace to sell 40, my price is high, I'm fine.

All of a sudden if my two.

Week sales rates start dropping off, maybe I got dropped my price to catch, you know, to get it back going again. So that's where I'm going to watch shopper count. I'm going to watch again. You can go to google.com trends, type in used cars and see how many people are going to Google looking for used cars. If you got auto trader, you can look at shopper accounts there and see if there's less shoppers in the market.

What I like about looking at Google.

Versus auto trader, like if they do a lot of the auto trader sites that do a big marketing campaign and advertise a lot, they might get an uptick in shoppers to their site. Doesn't mean there's more people shop and they just seen their ad and moved. So I like going to Google and what's cool about Google trends, you can pick out your state and even down to counties and stuff and say look at Michigan. Okay, that's down. Well let me look at Detroit and see how Detroit's moving. So I look at. So if I'm looking at two week sales cycles, I'm gonna look at if I'm increasing or decreasing sales. If my sales are moving up, then I'm fine with my pricing. It's slowing down, make adjustments and get the cars moving, you know, but also be picky and choosy on which cars. Again, I was just on a meeting call. The ones with the bad wheels are not the big touchscreen, you know, or things like that. You know, wrong color combo, get aggressive. The right ones, the right trades, right equipment, maybe hold out.

Yeah.

Well, cool. Well, thank you so much, Jason.

Yeah, Jason, if dealers want to get a hold of you, learn more about this, how do we get in touch with you? How do we. Where are you at? Are you on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn?

Yeah, ton of stuff. So like you said earlier, I put.

A lot of tips that I got on my YouTube channel for La Pop. If you just look at Lotpop Inc. You subscribe there, there's over 250 video tips at least once a week I'm doing video tips there. But yeah, those video tips typically come off of my Facebook Live. I'll do Facebook Live. So Facebook, I'm all over LinkedIn and Facebook are the two major ones. And then the YouTube channel has a ton of free content. Even our website, lapop.com, all that contents there. But you can subscribe to the YouTube channel or Facebook and get notified there.

Awesome. Jason, thank you so much. Appreciate your time.

Hey, no problem.

Thank you guys.

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