Short answer: Anthony Monteiro says big buyers like CarMax and Carvana dominate auctions and fees compress margins, so AutoAcquire helps dealers reach the tens of thousands of customers in their own databases with a price upfront.
Watch this answer from Episode 25 (starts at 11:52) · Episode 25 notes and transcript
From Episode 25: Car Dealers Are Losing Inventory — AI Is the Only Fix, starting at 11:52.
Sam Nadler [11:52]: Okay. So that's perfect segue. Let's you're an industry veteran, thirty years. What, insights over your career led you to launch AutoAcquire? What was the biggest pain point? We've touched upon it a little bit, but let's transition specifically into your product.
Anthony Monteiro [12:08]: Yeah. I've seen a lot of different businesses and niches in this space of building software for car dealers. There's there's so many companies out there trying to do everything all the time, and they end up only doing some of it, okay. When you look at this demand in the used car market that it's really hard to go to auctions now and buy cars because the big guys, the CarMax's, the Carvana's, the Lithia's, the Sonix, they all go and they have teams of buyers, and they just buy they buy all the stuff that's at the auction. So it's really hard for your average dealer to go in and raise their hand and buy a car that's that's at a reasonable price. And then you got auction fees and transportation fees, you have all these things that add up. So now you go try to recondition and sell the car, your margins are super compressed. So we said, let's find vehicles that that our dealers literally have in the customer's driveways. Most of these dealers have 20,000, 40,000, 50,000 customers in their database, so why not just keep reaching out to them? I need to buy five F-150s.
Anthony Monteiro [13:20]: Well, I have a database of customers who have, let me see, 22,000 F-150s in the ownership database. Let me reach out to them and ask just simply ask them, do you wanna sell it? And put a price on it right out of the gate. We don't even have them go through the steps. We'll just put a price on it, and just think, in your scenario, if you had gotten an email two or three months ago or a month ago saying, hey. I want to what are you trying to sell or get rid of?
Sam Nadler [13:50]: Pathfinder and the rogue.
Anthony Monteiro [13:54]: Okay. So imagine receiving an email or a text message from that dealer a couple months ago saying, hey, Sam, I'd love to buy your Pathfinder and your Rogue, and here's how much I'll give you. All you do is push this button. Right? Yeah. It would be great. Deal with them would have been done by now. They would have acquired both of those vehicles. You wouldn't even have gone to CarMax or Carvana. So now what these dealers have done is they put themselves in a really bad scenario. You're gonna go to CarMax or Carvana and sell your car, and they're gonna lose that trade, and they're gonna be in this downward spiral of I can't get inventory, people aren't trading cars with me because they don't they're not giving the consumer the option to do it really easy, and they're not in the game. They're not in the game. That's the problem. Yeah. Just puts them in the game.
Jordan Metzner [14:39]: That's awesome. And, you
