Motorway says its entry into the remarketing sector is designed to provide its dealer customers with the types of stock they want, including younger vehicles and EVs.
The used car marketplace announced in May that it was launching an enterprise remarketing service, with Mobilize Financial Services as its first client.
The service sees end-of-lease vehicles profiled by their lessees, with any damage recorded, using an app tailored by Motorway for remarketing purposes. The vehicle is then auctioned to dealers on Motorway’s platform, before being collected and delivered straight from the lessee to the purchasing dealer.
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James Wilson, chief operating officer at Motorway, told Automotive Management that launching the service was a way of securing stock that would appeal to the company’s dealer customers.
Wilson said: “This is very attractive stock for our dealers. It’s younger stock, typically sub three to four years old, typically less than 30,000 miles, in good condition because they are younger vehicles.”
Wilson explained that Motorway’s dealer customers were part of the motivation for the company entering the remarketing sector in the first place.
He said: “To some extent, we’re reacting to their feedback, which is, ‘Can you get us some of this stock through the Motorway platform? We like the Motorway platform, we’d like to see this kind of stock as well’.”
Wilson said that the service was also intended to improve the availability of EVs through Motorway, with plug-in vehicles currently more common on fleets than in the consumer market.
He said: “Dealers are moving in that direction and want that stock, so being able to provide that through fleets is a really interesting opportunity for us.”
Brand-specific auctions possible
Something Motorway has introduced as an option for its remarketing customers is a closed auction model, whereby Mobilize, owned by Renault Group, can sell its Renault cars exclusively to the brand’s franchised dealers.
Wilson explained: “The remarketer is one of our customers in this model and they want to keep the vehicles ideally within their franchise network, and we have set up a solution to accommodate that.
“Some remarketers don’t want or need to do that. They have lots of different brands. They don’t have a dealer network in the same way. But if they do have that and they would like to do that, we have built the platform to accommodate that.”
Wilson added that Motorway was not only looking at working with large remarketers such as Mobilize.
He said: “At this stage, we are open to conversations with remarketers, and the model scales to whether you’re small or large.
“What’s been exciting is we’ve seen Mobilize really ramp up in the last couple of months. We launched this in May, and last month we had over 1,000 cars for sale. So, we have started to see some volume come through, and our expectation is that will continue to grow.”
Remarketing to be ‘significant’ for Motorway
Wilson said that he expected remarketing to become a major part of Motorway’s overall business.
He said: “We expect it to be significant. We wouldn’t have made the investment we have to set this up and make this move otherwise.
“It’s building off our core business, but we see it as a separate business line that has significant opportunity.
“There are two million lease cars in the UK parc at the moment, which will be cycling through, and then on top of that there are other opportunities for other types of remarketing as well. So, it’s a very substantial part of the market, which is attractive.
“But the key thing for us is not just doing a ‘me too’ product – it’s how do we innovate the business model for the benefit of the customer, the leaser and the dealers. And I think that’s what we found with this model.”
Regarding the overall Motorway business, which previously said it was on track to reach profitability by mid-2026, Wilson said it was performing strongly.
He said: “We are on track. It’s been a really strong first half of the year for us in terms of that plan. So that’s very, very pleasing.
“We’re continuing to see consistent growth in cars being put up for sale in the auctions. We’re not only trying to become profitable, we also want to ensure that we continue to grow and provide more of a range of vehicles, a greater number of vehicles to our dealerships. And so far, that’s what we’re seeing.
“We finished the first half of the year in very good shape.”