Toomey Motor Group has expanded its used car refurbishment facilities after improving stock turn through four years of using Indicata pricing data.
The Essex dealer group said faster stock turn had increased pressure on its refurbishment and repair teams, prompting further investment in workshop capacity to support its used car operation.
Toomey reviews the pricing of every used vehicle in stock each week, benchmarking against the wider market and local competitors to keep its used car pricing competitive.
Ammar Khan, general sales manager at Toomey Motor Group, said customers were researching prices online long before visiting a dealership.
He said: “Consumers are very savvy and carry out a lot of research online before they even approach a dealer for a test drive so it’s important every one of our cars is competitively priced.
“It’s common for a consumer to contact us about a car if it’s a couple of hundred pounds cheaper than a rival dealer.”
Khan said monthly meetings with Indicata’s customer success team helped the dealer group review vehicle pricing and stock days, with some vehicles increasing in price where market demand justified it.
Pricing changes are automatically updated on the dealer group’s website through an API integration with Dealerweb, allowing revised prices to appear online within two hours.
Ensure you always receive AM insights. Make us a preferred source of news on Google
Volatility of used EV market makes accurate pricing challenging
Khan said the volatility of the used EV market had made accurate pricing increasingly challenging.
He said: “EVs are a good example of a changing market as they are still not following a logical price trend.
“Their pricing has been very volatile with certain models selling fast and other cars taking longer to sell.
“You would be hard pushed to value cars without the help of the right data because of the speed of change in this sector.”
The dealer group also uses Indicata’s Market Days’ Supply data when buying used vehicles, including part exchanges and auction purchases, to assess supply levels and support purchasing decisions.
Around 60% of Toomey’s used stock comes from customer part exchanges, with the remaining 40% sourced through trade channels.
Khan said the data also helped determine when the business could justify paying more for desirable used vehicles.
He added: “If Indicata’s MDS is low we know a car is very popular so we can afford to pay an extra £500 for the part exchange car in the knowledge that we are going to sell it quickly.”
Toomey sells around 6,000 used vehicles a year across the group.
Khan said stock turn is currently running at around 45 days, having previously fallen as low as 35 days.