Asbury Automotive Group is generating some strong certified pre-owned sales results, but the retailer isn’t satisfied quite yet.

No, the dealership group believes it still has growth potential in CPO and its overall used-car operations.

The topic of certified pre-owned came up several times during Asbury’s quarterly conference call earlier this week, and for good reason — its CPO sales were up 7 percent from a year ago on a same-store basis. This despite overall same-store used sales falling 3 percent.

“We believe there is additional opportunity to grow our used-vehicle unit sales, specifically our CPO sales as additional off-lease inventory comes to market,” chief operating officer David Hult said.

Later in the call, Hult mentioned that some of Asbury’s stronger stores have posted used-to-new ratios slightly higher than 1:1, which beats the industry average. And used volume may help, given some of the margin pressure.

“We’re trying to look at used vehicles in a holistic approach, and understanding what it generates for parts and service and that internal gross, and how we benefit from that,” he said. “As far as margin pressure going forward, I think it will look similar to what it looks like right now. But our opportunity is within the volume aspect … we’re very happy with that CPO increase. We think there’s more opportunity there.

“And we think some things that we’ve been working on within this past quarter will tend to come to fruition, plus the benefit of these stop-sale vehicles actually freeing up,” he said.

Hult also noted that CPO tends to command 35 percent to 40 percent of total used-car sales for Asbury.

“We see that there’s opportunity there to grow that number further,” Hult said.

Asked by call participant whether he sees overall industry CPO sales softening, Hult said that doesn’t appear to the case, based on what they have heard from peers and the industry.