Like virtually every franchised car retailer in the country last year, Florida dealer Teddy Morse found it only natural to ramp up focus on the long-trusty used-vehicle market in the face of volatile supply and shrinking new-vehicle inventories.
Morse, CEO of Ed Morse Automotive Group, of Delray Beach, Fla., had employees put extra effort into searching auctions across the country — even as far away as California and Arizona — for used vehicles to put on his dealership lots as trade-ins from new-vehicle purchases waned. And the strategy paid off. Ed Morse Automotive retailed 13,751 used vehicles in 2021, up 45 percent from 9,478 in 2020.
"There's no magic pill here," Morse told Automotive News. "We had an increase in used cars, and I would love to tell you that we figured out some type of formula that allowed us to increase our used-car business, but it was out of necessity, and we did what needed to be done to find our customers vehicles."