With leasing extremely popular with consumers and certified pre-owned models turning at a record pace, a marriage between the two markets came into the conversation again when American International Automobile Dealers Association hosted a webinar on Tuesday, reviewing this year and looking ahead to 2016.

As two of the event’s experts took turns touting the upbeat prospects for both the leasing and CPO markets, Michael Collins of Dealertrack Technologies still wasn’t ready to announce nuptials that might lead dealers and finance companies to cheer during a celebratory reception of moving modestly used metal via a lease.

“I’m not sure banks would consider it,” Collins said about the prospect of CPO leasing gaining a major market share.

“As an old leasing guy from years ago, I certainly would considerate it,” added Collins, who is now senior vice president of lender and F&I solutions at Dealertrack.

Collins did touch on what industry elements need to be in place if CPO leasing ever could gain momentum.

“I think if you’ve got predictability in used-car prices and predictability in supply — and I think we do. With relatively stable pricing, I think a CPO lease opportunity exists,” he said.

“I don’t know how big it is. I don’t know how much the captives may want to go after it. I think it’s there,” Collins added.

Collins went on to mention that new-vehicle leasing is especially important to the industry seeing vehicles roll over the curb in 2016. Experian Automotive reported that leasing accounted for nearly 27 percent of all new-vehicle transactions in the third quarter of this year, up from 24.7 percent the previous year. Collins said he can see that level approaching 30 percent; perhaps even surpassing it.

“It’s a response to wanting to keep monthly payment as flat as we can make them,” Collins said about the industry pulling the leasing lever to put consumers into vehicles.

“This is an industry that is driven by consumers who are driven by payment. There’s no reason in our view why leasing wouldn’t continue to slowly increase,” he added.

ADESA Analytical Services chief economist Tom Kontos also participated in Tuesday’s webinar and agreed about the penetration new-vehicle leasing might generate going forward.

“The prices of new cars continues to go up,” Kontos said. “The demands for that vehicle to have more technology, more safety features, better gas mileage, that all adds to the cost, as well.

“It just makes it more sensible going forward to lease half a car than purchase a whole car for a good portion of the population,” he continued.

Whether it’s leasing a new vehicle — or perhaps one day a CPO model — Kontos maintained how critical the placement of residual values is.

“I distinguish between residual values on lease contract and actual wholesale market values,” he said. “Definitely wholesale market values will have downward pressure.

“The residual values were set three years ago so in terms of residual value losses, that all depends on how the captive finance companies and the banks set their residuals three years ago,” he continued.

“If they set them too aggressively based on the strength of the market two or three years ago, then they’re really going to see some fairly significant residual value losses in 2016 and 2017,” Kontos went on to say. “If they were more conservative and taking into account the growth in volume that was really foreseen back then, then the residual value losses will less notable.”