How Do You Find a Specific Car Fast on a Dealership Lot?
To find a specific car on a dealership lot fast, work a fixed search order — DMS status first, then service, detail, and photos — instead of walking rows. A parked car is almost never lost at random; someone in your store moved that car for a reason. Parking-spot fields decay within days because nobody updates the record after the move....
Everybody Added Capacity. Nobody Added Output.
What Q2's fixed ops stall means for dealership operations. In four business days at the end of July, six of the largest public dealership groups in North America told the same story with slightly different numbers. Service is now roughly half of their gross profit. And in the second quarter, it barely grew....
Why Does Reconditioning Take So Long at a Dealership?
Reconditioning at a dealership takes so long because used vehicles spend most of their recon time waiting between stages, not being worked on inside them. The delay is queue time — waiting for inspection after stock-in, waiting for estimate approval, waiting for parts, waiting for detail, waiting for photos. Fix the handoffs between the eight recon steps and days to line falls without adding a single technician....
How Do You Keep Track of Keys at a Busy Dealership?
The most reliable way to keep track of keys at a busy dealership is to attach a Bluetooth tracking tag to every key so location is recorded automatically. A key board and a sign-out sheet both depend on someone remembering to log a key — and both fail at 5pm on a Saturday with a customer standing there. Replacing a lost key runs under $50 to over $600, according to Edmunds (2025)....
What Is RTLS for Car Dealerships? A Complete Guide
RTLS — a real-time location system — tracks where every key and every vehicle is on a dealership property, continuously and automatically, with no one scanning a barcode or updating a spreadsheet. Dealership RTLS runs on battery-powered Bluetooth tags and fixed readers rather than GPS, because GPS goes blind indoors: service bays, detail shops, and parking garages. Mobile Dealer Data (MDD) built the approach inside Longo Toyota in 2015....
The 80-Day Lot Is Back: What Swelling Inventory Means for Dealership Operations
For the first time in years, dealers are staring at a familiar problem with an unfamiliar price tag. U.S. new-vehicle inventory rose sharply in early July — dealers entered the month with roughly 2.83 to 2.95 million units in stock, and days' supply jumped to about 82 days, roughly 12 days higher than a month earlier (Automotive News). At the same time, sales stalled. More metal is landing on lots faster than shoppers are clearing it, and the gap is widening....
Three Departments, One Platform: Margin Hiding in Plain Sight
For decades, the path to profit ran straight through the showroom: sell more cars. The dealers pulling ahead now are finding fresh margin in the operations they already run — service, used cars, and F&I — by running them tighter, not bigger....
The Future of Automotive Reinsurance: Unlocking New Sources of Participation Income
Reinsurance has quietly built more wealth for dealers than almost any other part of the business. But the engine that powered it — the vehicle service contract — is running hotter than it used to. The next wave of participation income will belong to the dealers who change what goes into the book....