There was a small concentration of vehicles that GE Capital Fleet Services found challenging to sell earlier this year.  So, in response, the company launched an incentive package for its online wholesale buyers, through which if a buyer purchased three of those vehicles, he or she would receive a buyer’s fee discount that GE Capital Fleet Services would pay for.

“The fee discount brought more and more buyers to our vehicles, which resulted in more vehicles sold,” said Paul Seger, vice president of asset remarketing.  

When that incentive package was launched, Seger said, the company saw an “immediate impact.”

Such an approach has been part of the company’s focus this year: incentives to drive online buying and thus increase the prices in the lane.

All vehicles in its consignment are offered first in an open, competitive-bid auction process with online dealer influence, meaning all vehicles they sell in the lanes have dealers bidding via Simulcast or LiveBlock technology connected to that sale.

Seger said in a July interview that at that point, online lane buyers had increased by roughly 5 percent year-to-date.

“The more buyers you can get online to actually bid on the vehicles drives up the prices,” he said. “We’ve actually been very aggressive this year with buying incentives focusing just on online buyers.”

GE Capital Fleet Services has also continued to hold large volume event sales in the physical lanes, with as many buyers online as possible, as well, to drive demand.

Typically, GE Capital Fleet Services will end up selling nearly 90 percent of the cars it consigns. But it does have a strategy should any of its offerings not sell at the auction.

“When it comes to those that we don’t sell, it may be that we didn’t have the right buyers or the right number of buyers there, but we know we had a benchmark run from what that vehicle brought that day,” Seger said.

“We might have wanted $10,000 for that vehicle, but that particular day, we received $8,500. My team will take those vehicles, and they’ll price them somewhere between $8,500 and $10,000. They will then post those online at a buy-now price, but only after it’s crossed the block in a competitive bid environment,” he continued.

“We feel that’s a really good way for us to protect our customers’ returns. If you just put your vehicles up online first, the ones that are probably going to buy are the ones that go over your floor price in the lanes, anyway,” Seger added. “This way we’ve researched it a little more; we’ve run them in the lane; we know what the market brought, which all leads to maximizing the net returns for our customers.”

Editor's Note: This story is part of our Top Fleet, Lease & Rental Trends coverage in the Sept. 1 print and digital editions of Auto Remarketing.