On Tuesday, SouthWest Dealer Services — an independent full-service provider of F&I products and services to dealers — announced that SWDS Holdings’ board of directors appointed Vernon Leake as chief executive officer. Leake succeeds Eric Hamann, who will now serve as president of SouthWest Dealer Services. “Vernon and I have worked together for several years. […] [Read More]

White Clarke Group acknowledged that it seemed like just a few months ago that experts thought auto finance companies would inevitably lose their businesses to technology-savvy new players entering the market as disruptors. The company predicted these new entrants would focus hard on customer needs, understand where the weaknesses are in existing sales models, and […] [Read More]

In addition to announcing that dealers can now register for its sales online, CarMax Auctions recently shared plans to add five locations in fiscal-year 2017, including one this summer that will be its first in the San Francisco Bay area.   The five new locations include: Pleasanton, Calif.  (Set to begin this summer) El Paso, […] [Read More]

Search Optics is expanding its reach worldwide, hiring five new executives to help secure a foothold in the international automotive industry. The company announced the hiring of five new senior executives in the US, EMEA and APAC regions. The executives are: Guy Barron, senior vice president, global human resources Amanda Frank, vice president, brand marketing Xavier […] [Read More]

Auto dealer review website DealerRater just put itself to the test to see how effective its product can be for new car buyers. A new study from Oracle Data Cloud, announced Tuesday by DealerRater, showed that visitors of DealerRater’s profile pages are 3.5 times more likely to buy a vehicle than other consumers. Of those visitors […] [Read More]

J.D. Byrider recently expanded its buy-here, pay-here dealership footprint in Colorado by bringing a new franchisee in the process. The newest J.D. Byrider dealership is in Denver. It's the second store in Colorado but the first one for franchisee Rick Steenbock. “My team and I are very excited to expand the J.D. Byrider brand to Denver,” […] [Read More]

As wholesale prices for compact vehicles continued to soften, Black Book representatives in the lanes last week noticed a significant amount of dealers sat on their floor-plan wallets stemming from the frequency of units that rolled over the block without the hammer finalizing a sale. According to the latest Black Book Market Insights report, the […] [Read More]

Sales of off-rental heavy 2015 model-year vehicles at auction have finally surpassed sales of 2014 vehicles on a like-age basis, according to NADA Used Car Guide’s Guidelines report for May. While sales of mostly off-rental 2015s trended downward over the past two months, the nearly 136,500 sold at auction in April and May was 12 […] [Read More]

Coinciding with the federally mandated website disclosing how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau spends its budget on government contractors, more U.S. House members — including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan — continued the parade of bill proposals and other ideas about how to modify the CFPB’s structure and regulatory powers. First, according to data […] [Read More]

AuctionVcommerce has launched its Clerk Training Simulator, the company said Monday. This follows close to a year of product development for the tool, which is designed to foster consistency in the industry for online clerking and boost online participation and sales. The Clerk Training Simulator also aims to curb clerk turnover and block errors.  “Expectations […] [Read More]