Retail Markets

Alabama

Erek Yarbrough, owner, First Class Auto Sales, Bessemer, Ala.

(Yarbrough is the Alabama Quality Dealer of the Year)

“I always loved business. I started out selling candy and bubble gum since I was age of 5 or 6. I always wanted to have a business, just didn’t know what type of business. I went to a public car auction by happenstance and just put the two together. I thought, all right, that’s it, the car business.

“I started with one car as a wholesaler. I worked my way up to a couple of cars and, eventually, we worked our way up to a retail location. We’ve been rocking ever since.

“We’re retail. We have our toe in buy-here, pay-here water, but we’re primarily retail.

“We usually keep 20 to

25 cars in inventory and we usually sell about 15-20 per month.

“Our inventory is mostly cars. We mostly focus in the subprime area where the ACV is around $7,000 to $8,000. Average retail would be around $15,000.

“Our average down payment is somewhere around $1,500 and $2,000.

“We primarily used Credit Acceptance Corp. They probably do about 95% of our business.

“We mostly acquire our cars through auctions, auctions, auctions. We use a few live auctions. But, mostly now, it’s all digital. We utilize the ACV service, ADESA Simulcast, America’s Auto Auction Simulcast, etc.

“Five years ago, it was all in-person auctions, driving all over the state to various auctions. COVID forced me to go online once they shut live auctions down.

“For advertising and marketing, that’s pretty much me. I do a series of Facebook ads. I’m on Tik Tok. I’m on Instagram. I do all that personally.

“Our area code happens to be 205, so I came up with a moniker ‘205approved.com.’ So that’s my website. I own it. So, I do a lot of a Tik Tok ads where I drive people to that website.

“The last vehicle we sold was a Toyota Corolla. It was a 2015. Mileage was probably about 120,000 or 130,000. I don’t remember the retail price, but the customer had about $1,500 down.”

South Carolina

Brandon Davis, sales manager, Good Deal Car Sales, Florence, S.C.

“We’ve been a dealership for two years. Before that, I was a kitchen manager at Outback. I was working a whole bunch of hours at the restaurant. I figured if I could work this number of hours for myself instead, there’s no way we can’t win.

“We keep between 45 to 60 vehicles on the lot. Most of our cars come from auction. We also use NextGear to floorplan most of our cars.

So, if we find someone’s personal car, we can buy that, too.

“We usually use Manheim Darlington.

“We carry everything –cars, trucks, SUVs. We try to have something for everyone, a one-stop shop.

“For mileage, we’ll carry from under 100k to 200k. It depends on what it looks like. If it’s a truck, we know they go way over 200,000. So, the higher mileage vehicles are trucks. For normal cars, we try to stay between 100,000 to 130,000 miles.

“For age, we’re not going older than 2005.

“We do regular sales and buy-here, pay-here. I would say a good 35% to 40% are buy-here, pay-here.

“We have not had a lot of repos. We do use starter interrupt and GPS.

“Retail prices range from $5,000 to $10,000.

“We were sending cars out for reconditioning, but we recently got a mechanic who is really good.

“(For advertising) the corner that we’re on is a really busy corner, so pretty much everybody who’s going to Myrtle Beach comes by that corner. Word of mouth is also really helping. We also just put an ad out on the radio for the first time, still waiting to see how that goes.

“We just closed on a 2011 Ford-150. It had 119,000. We got $16,000. We did not have to do any reconditioning.”