At present, commercial vehicles and SUVs are popular and performing strongly in the used car sector. This is also mirrored in the new car sector. In 2017, just under 1.2m new vehicles were sold which is a 0.9% increase on 2016. However, of significance, it was the first year that the sale of SUVs outstripped the sale of passenger vehicles. Light commercial vehicles were also up on 2016 sales by 20%.
Consumer confidence with a stable economy and low-interest rates seem to be driving the sales – in addition, the market is super competitive amongst manufacturers as they all search for market share.
We have recently launched numerous applications that can assist vendors in the inspection, valuation and sale of client assets. Ultimately, we aim to improve operational efficiencies that previously required a significant amount of time and effort to transact upon. We continue to travel nationally and internationally to understand what our international partners are doing to ensure we remain best practice and maximise returns.
Pickles Mercantile Services continues to gather momentum with many small financiers now utilising Pickles as a ‘one stop shop’. In addition, our strong partnership with Westpac went to another level after we went live nationally in April with Pickles Mercantile Services, ensuring a robust and unified approach was in place with all parties. Throughout the month of March, Pickles developed and rolled out our approach to the Takata/Alpha Airbag recall. After assessing over 10,000 vehicles in stock and running scripts against the relevant OEM’s Takata Search engines, we determined that less than 3% of vehicles in our facilities were affected by the recall. Our process now incorporates the referencing on the assets VIN# to ensure we have ongoing oversight into the recall. We continue to actively work with all our vendors and our connections via our manufacturer relationships to have the relevant vehicles rectified for resale.
07 Jun