Another Used Car Manager in the Hot Seat

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Another Used Car Manager in the Hot Seat

Back when I was running an auto auction on a day to day basis, I could pretty much guess the fiscal year end for a dealership.

It wasn’t magic. There was a pattern. A new Used Car Manager in the “hot seat” and a whole lot of aged inventory hitting the lanes.

The disposal of the “legacy vehicles” was the dealership’s reset back to zero.

The instructions to the new guy were usually “all those overpriced units from before have to go.”

Mr Clean Slate. The new Used Car Manager.

I realized that the longer the manager was able to just sit in his seat, the less work I would have to do re-establishing relationships with the new guy. So if acquiring inventory incorrectly was what usually got the Used Car Manager in trouble, why not bring the market to him to get the right price?

He could effectively never be wrong again.

And so began our startup, Selectbidder. It was an appraisal/acquisitions system that connected dealerships right to the market at the time of trade.  In theory, a dealer to dealer live trade-in marketplace makes sense. Except that:

  • The “market” isn’t always on
  • The available market isn’t always the best market
  • There is “bidder fatigue”: dealers are too busy to worry about a trade-in that they may or may not get anyway

But there was a better “mousetrap.” It was the brainchild of Robert Hollenshead, the world’s largest wholesaler. He called it Accu-Trade.

Today’s Used Car Manager needs the best, most relevant live market data to price their trade-ins — and that data has to be on the money, every time. Period. Full-stop. Forget about the books that don’t buy cars. How many cars did the book buy last week? How about last year? Same answer: zero.

Accu-Trade uses the exact same process to acquire vehicles for wholesale profit that Hollenshead Auto Sales uses to buy hundreds of cars with. Every. Single. Day. Here’s the tool that helped make Bob Hollenshead the largest wholesaler in the world.

Use it to buy right and sell right.

Accu-Trade Appraiser – we use localized, VIN-specific, condition-based Canadian and US datasets to provide on-the-money values that span back over 15 years.

About Us

Accu-Trade provides dealers across North America with the same proven tools that the Robert Hollenshead Auto Sales team of over 50 buyers uses to buy and sell 50,000 units a year. We are also the theory and development engine behind the product widely known as Trade-In Marketplace, which is now branded as Kelly Blue Book Instant Cash Offer after being acquired by Cox Automotive in 2014.

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