This year's NADA show will open its doors on Friday, March 23rd and it's shaping up to be an enlightening weekend. NADA is much more than just an automotive expo, it's an educational experience. People from all over the industry come together to share their knowledge and learn from each other. NADA 2018 will also feature over 100 educational workshops, 500 exhibitors and a host of talented keynote speakers.

The new year is upon us at last and it's time to take a look at some of the top auto trends to watch in 2018 so that you can position yourself for success. Let's just get right into it.

The team at ReconTRAC would like to wish you and yours a very Happy Holiday season. We know it's a crazy, hectic, wonderful time of the year. So, we'd like to help make your job easier.  We have some exciting news to share with you about a new optional integration feature now available to all CDK users. If you'd like some additional information about this optional feature, click here to contact us. 

Consumers are getting smarter about their purchases, and that could be a challenge for your bottom line. It's funny how dealers are still subject to the age-old stereotype of a greedy salesman leaning back and counting stacks of money when your modern car dealership has to sell more, sell faster, and sell smarter just to keep the doors open.

Hurricane season has been especially brutal this year, with damages from Harvey costing as much as $180 billion and damages from Irma trending upwards of $100 billion. While most of the recovery expenses will go towards property damage, a large portion will go towards vehicle losses due to extensive flooding from the storms.

The car dealership of the future has always been a topic of intense discussion and disagreement among industry leaders. The biggest point of contention seems to be whether dealerships will even be relevant in a few years from now.

If you were planning a trip to a place you'd never been. And you were looking for the fastest route. Would you plan that trip without using GPS?

Reconditioning costs and time to market are crucial to the profitability of your used car inventory.  So, as you know, the goal is to minimize both as much as possible. In order to reduce your reconditioning costs and time to market (cycle time), you need to know how you’re current process is tracking. More so, you need to know what part of the process may be slowing down your cycle time and/or costing you money. The old adage “knowledge is power” is very true in this situation. Do you really know how long each car’s time to market is and/or average recon cost is? 
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2017 is starting to look like a promising year for used car dealers. However, many dealers are finding they need to sell MORE used cars than they did in previous years just to make the same profit as before. And with consumers becoming more and more educated about the car buying process it's making the market much more competitive than ever. Simply put, the number of cars sold is increasing, but margins are lower than in years passed.