The Daily Vroom

Good morning, Vroomers!

A little bonus edition for you today. There’s a lot happening behind the scenes across nearly every platform—everyone’s jockeying for position, trying to get one step ahead. Makes you wonder if we’ll see some consolidation.

It’s tricky in this space, though. Many platforms, even the smaller ones, are backed by major conglomerates always looking for the best deal. Some are content just maintaining an online presence, while others are constantly exploring partnerships and new ways to stay competitive.

One thing’s certain: standing still for too long isn’t an option in this market.

YESTERDAY’S TOP 5 SALES

It was a Ford GT, & GT3 & GT3 RS day for the top sales, some truly amazing cars.

Want to dive deeper into any of these listings? Just click on the car to take you directly to the listing.

Cars & Bids Post-Layoffs: Holding Steady or Just Treading Water?

At the start of last week, we covered the unfortunate layoffs at Cars & Bids. Now, it’s still early, and time may tell a different story, but I wanted to take a quick look at their sales both before and after the layoffs to see if any trends emerge—specifically, whether operating with a smaller workforce has had any noticeable impact.

Of course, the caveat here is that this is a very small slice of data. The cars in these results were already in their pipeline before the layoffs, so we’re not looking at listings acquired post-reduction.

That said, the first chart below is interesting. The week of the layoffs (Feb 18) saw their best sales week of the month, with the highest number of total sales. In fact, the very next day, they sold 100% of their listings. This past week also outperformed the three prior weeks in terms of total sales.

However, the average sale price continues to bounce between $23K and $27K—not a high number, especially when you consider that the market-wide daily average sits between $42K and $50K. So what does this tell us from the limited data we have?

For now, Cars & Bids is still managing to list and sell at nearly the same pace as before—if not slightly better. Their ability to close deals post-auction (RNM hustle) is still very much intact, meaning someone on the team is still working that angle well.

But here’s where it gets interesting: while they raised their fees (which I think was the right move), those fee increases mainly apply to $100K+ sales—and they’ve hardly had any of those. A few more may show up next week, but right now, the bigger question is: how do they attract high-value buyers and sellers? That’s something I’ll be watching closely.

Another key factor: growth mode vs. maintenance mode. They’ve obviously massively reduced costs, but can they grow listings with a much smaller, possibly demoralized team? Next week, they’re averaging 24 listings per day—is that enough? Is there a bigger strategy at play beyond just cutting costs? And most importantly, does that strategy go beyond purely digital growth?

Time will tell. I’ll be keeping an eye on it.