The April sales data is getting a lot of coverage for the headline number, down about 7% depending on whose estimate you use, but the detail that is actually affecting my desk every single day is buried in the JD Power forecast. Nearly one in three trade-ins currently carries negative equity. That is the real friction point in deal structure right now and it is not getting better until used vehicle values stabilize. When a customer comes in with four thousand dollars in negative equity on a trade, you are not having a vehicle selection conversation. You are having a math conversation, and the math very often does not work at current rates and transaction prices. Incentives are up 11.1% across the industry which gives us some room to bridge gaps but the combination of negative equity trades, elevated rates, and transaction prices that have not come down meaningfully yet is creating a trifecta that makes a large portion of the traffic walking in the door structurally unable to complete a deal. The SAAR can say 16.1 million all it wants. I am watching it at the individual deal level and the denominator is shrinking.
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One in three is the industry…
One in three is the industry number. At my store it has been closer to 40 percent of trade-ins for the past two months. What nobody talks about is the time cost at the desk. A clean deal takes 45 minutes in F&I. A deal with four thousand dollars in negative equity that we are trying to structure around takes two hours and often still falls apart at the lender. My close rate on negative equity deals is half what it is on clean transactions. The OEM incentive stack helps on the front but it does not fix a customer who is nine months into a 72-month note on a vehicle that depreciated faster than the payment came down. That person should not be buying a car right now and we both know it.
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