My mission here is to make whole tail easy. And that's the opportunity is to really reinvent the industry and fundamentally shift the way people operate. And in many cases, that answer boils on to give me customers. Yes, it's not a question of if it's a question of when, because this is all data that exists. A big thank you to our sponsors for making today's episode possible. Lot links, card dealership, guy news, and open lane. And now let's get into the show.
Shave.on the CDG podcast. Shave, welcome. Thank you for having me, O.C. Happy to be here. Good, good to have you on. You guys have opened lane. You've been through some crazy changes here in the last couple of years. So I'm excited to dig into a little bit of your story and what you're up to. Yeah. No, I'm, and I'm excited to be here. And listen to your podcast. Super exciting. And following you closely on LinkedIn as well. I, I'm not going to lie if I tell you, not going to lie if I tell you, you're my first source of the truth and what's going on in the industry, especially for somebody who's new to the industry. So I appreciate the work you're doing for me personally. All right.
Well, I like you already then. All right. Well, I mean, it's a good start, right? So tell me, tell me a little bit about as a startup guy myself, formerly. I looked through a background. So you've had, you know, a bit, a bunch of different experiences that brought you up to this point in your career. Give us a little bit of, you know, background on yourself. What brought you to automotive? I was thinking about, I was thinking about this myself, you know, and I probably would have answered this question differently. You're so back. But, you know, one thing when since I've joined openly and that I've heard consistently from everyone, and I've, I've been out in the field talking to like dealers, you know, almost every week. And the one thing that keeps getting mentioned is that this is a relationship business, right?
And so in some respects, I would say I would start there to say what brought me to open in his relationships. I knew some of the people who are in the leadership roles, I actually work with them in prior experiences. And they kind of knew me very well, knew some of the work I had done in the past. I've spent a lot of time in innovation and transformation role. You know, I am driven by customer problem solving. And I've worked on kind of the, in roles where you have to think outside of the box, think horizontally and vertically. And so they kind of reached out to me in this particular role. And they said, hey, we'll have to bring some outside thinking to challenge the status quo. And that was exciting.
I will say I have in the past, dabbled in automotive. You said you're a startup guy. I worked in a startup. Sadly, I failed. I didn't succeed. But I spent two years trying to do a startup in the automotive space, specifically in commuter ride sharing, actually, of all things back in 2015. Now I'm aging myself. I loved it. I love that time. I love the industry. I love the people. I love the opportunity. It's just, there's just so much. It's right for a change, right for disruption, right for opportunity. And so when you factor in the relationships, you factor in the industry. And it's about people. I just love the people I met at Open Lane and I love.
And so I was like, Hey, I want to get in back into the space. You know, I noticed that about your, I noticed how about your experience, how you have been in these like transformation roles, which, you know, is a fully loaded term, but here's my question for you, right? So you get into automotive, right? You get into automotive retail. What was the most antiquated thing that you noticed or saw? And I asked you that as an outsider, quote unquote, right?
You came into the industry, right? Us or anyone that's in the business that's been in here for a decade, two decades, whatever, like we see it every day, right? There's certain things sometimes. I'm like, wow, I, you know, someone mentioned to me, I'm like, wait, I didn't even know that didn't even realize you're right. This is like, this could be done so much better. So what was or what still is potentially like one of the most antiquated parts of the business in your mind?
Okay, this is going to be an interesting one. Um, the one thing that comes to my mind, number one, and first and foremost is really mindset. And it's going to be an odd one to say. Um, I talked about like, you know, I talked about the industry and I talked about how everybody sold me. It's a relationship business, which by the way, I believe, and I fundamentally, whether it's this industry or any other industry, I do believe relationships are critical. And, and it is critical to our longterm success. And you can talk about AI and technology, all you want, but relationships are always going to be important. And that's an a key driver of, uh, customer problem solving.
What I mean by mindset is one of the things that I've had to, uh, that I've been challenged with often is people have told me, well, it's different in the automotive industry. You know, that's not exactly how we work. Right. In this industry, that doesn't really apply. And, and the more I thought about it and the more I talk about it, the problem sound eerily similar to many of the problems I've, I've worked in pretty much any other industry and I've spanned appliances, services, beauty startups. You know, I've done a lot of things. And ultimately when you start getting down to the core customer problems, like listening and, and hearing your customers, interestingly enough, the problem sound eerily similar. So probably my, the biggest paradigm shift that I feel is one of a almost like a mindset and a cultural shift to say, to ask ourselves, whenever you're dealing with a problem in this industry is to say, not get bogged down by how it's been done, but ask yourself, take your own experiences and ask yourself, what do I love? What do I expect in my, in the world today? And why not? So it's, it's the just imagine the fall of philosophy. And you as a startup probably understand that. That's the thing. That's the mindset shift is the one that I am trying to get across more than you want. If I had to paint in point one, if that makes any sense.
No, I think I, you actually surprised me with your response, because I thought you were going to go to like a hard example, meaning like, you know, the way this is being purchased or that is being sold and you went to a very codicle, like soft example on the more like emotion, emotional intelligence side. And so you surprised me in a good way, which I think it's a good point you make, right? Like when when we're doing certain things in certain ways, it's, it's, it's easy to get caught up in like, Hey, this is how it's been being done. Or this is how it's being done in automotive. But yeah, I mean, I think having that ability to kind of think a layer deeper and really pressure test how we're, whether it's the way we buy and sell cars whole sale or that we finance cars, whatever it may be, I think you're coming at it from a good angle.
So let's fast forward a little bit there, right? Where are we at today with wholesale? Where are we going? If you think about wholesaling, right? Ultimately, like I said, you're in the business of retailing. That's the data exists. All the data exists. What you're retailing, how much you're selling, what's the opportunity? You know, how much could you sell it for? What, what the marketplace is bearing? All the data exists. So the opportunity to optimize to say, when should I want to actually need to wholesale a car? And let's be clear, when you say need to wholesale a car, it's saying finding the right buyer, right by the right place, right? And I'm and, you know, making sure I'm optimizing my time. All that data exists. The ability to actually preempt that and to be able to tell somebody and say, Hey, you know what? It looks like you have XYZ in your inventory. You need to get rid of it and then finding the rights buyer and connecting you and doing that fast speed is critical.
It's not that the doesn't, it's not happening today. The process is long. It can be as long as I've heard talking to dealers, I was actually with a dealer on the West Coast this week and they were saying it can be 20 to 30 days long. So going from the 20 to 30 days down to like one to two days, that's the opportunity and time is money. So as I think about the future of wholesale, that's where we're going to have to get, we're going to have to get to a place where we're saving people. Incredible amounts of time and increasing their productivity. Mm hmm. I want to ask you a bit more about the actual, just the tactical wholesaling experience and what you've experienced and the dealers you're working with.
But tell me just to table set real quick, just give us like a 30 second overview of your business model today for anyone that's either not familiar with what open lane does or has never purchased a car through open lane. Just to give us like a little overview of what open lane does today, all the different types of divisions you have.
So like I said, open lane has been around for over 25 years. In fact, we started off, we used to actually be in the physical auction business ourselves, but we have now committed to fully digital. So what do we do? We enable, we, we to talk about making wholesale easy. And so we manage the entire wholesale journey all the way from, you know, we, and by the way, we have different parts of our businesses that manages different pieces.
So all the way from identifying, helping a retailer, identifying cars that they want to wholesale to helping them then actually inspect those cars, making so you have really high quality inspection condition reports, right? That's critical to build trust. We do that. Then we take those cars and we place them on our online digital marketplace. We connect buyers and sellers together, right? So we, we enable them to find each other. We enabled them to shop their way.
So one, this is a really important point. We don't have a one size shoe fits all wholesaling solution. We run time dachshunds, right? Similar to what a physical auction is, like a two hour auction, we run those on specific days. So if you're looking for a specific day, we do that. We have a marketplace solution, which means cars are there 24 seven. I can shop whenever 12 o'clock in the night. I want to engage in bio car. We can enable that.
And we have something called absolute sale, which is essentially almost like a guaranteed auction format, which runs daily and it runs from a 90s cent of four Easton and essentially allows its sellers saying, hey, I'm committed to selling the car. So buyers don't waste their time and they can engage in and buy cars. So we, we enable these different formats of solutions for people to buy cars. We also, from a wholesaling journey after you've chosen to buy the car, right?
We also enable both logistics as well. So you can, we can, we can actually manage the transportation of the car. We also enable manage arbitration, right? So if you have a problem with the car, we, we manage that from our site. And as part of the arbitration, we also do, we have something called buyback guarantee and in certain cars and certain situations, we'll also, we'll take the car back. No questions us. It's like a free return, if you will. So if it doesn't work for you, we manage that piece as well.
So we manage that entire cycle of, of, of wholesale, the entire life cycle. And one other point I would make out is we have both dealer cars as well as off lease cars. We also have repo business. So we have repo cars as well. So, so we have every kind of inventory available to purchase on open lane.com.
我们管理整个批发业务的生命周期。还有一点我要强调的是,我们有经销商的车辆,也有租赁到期的车辆。另外,我们还有回收业务的车辆。所以,我们在 open lane.com 上有各种类型的库存车辆可供购买。
So tell me why go all digital? Like what's your thesis there on just the future and I guess president of wholesale. I would simply put it down to focus. Right. Like I think a very important thing is, and I learned this a long time ago, you'll see in other businesses I've, I've done as well is one of the hardest jobs in a company is prioritization. Right. And the, and the more you diversify and do different things, the less you are good at one thing.
I would say that we see the value in digital. We understand that it is, it is a very efficient way of solving dealer problems. If we bifurcated our focus, you'll see, I think we would be, we would be, we would be split. And we used to, we used to do that. We used to decide on how we want to manage different things. We want to double down on our core competency. We see ourselves as a technology company, a data company.
Right. So we'd say we're a data and technology company. First, that enables a solution that can, that for dealers to make their lives easier. This episode is brought to you by lot links dealers. When you look onto your lab, do you see risk every day? Almost half of the dealers inventories at risk of aging. That's an average of a $1,500 hit on your gross profit per vehicle, but savvy dealers can avoid risk and get that money back.
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So tell me a little bit about the trends, right? What are you seeing as the trends in the wholesale marketplace economy right now? Like shifting and talking tech, behavior, transport, where are we at right now? What's changing? It's fascinating because it's rapidly changing. To begin with, I would just start off by saying you'll see is like easy as everything, right? We need everything. It comes to me as like every conversation I have is about the easy button. I'm talking to dealers. Again, I was with a dealer a couple of weeks ago and that was actually the words they used. They're like, we need the easy button. We just I don't want to spend time thinking about this problem. I just want to take in care of. And in many cases, that answer boils on to give me customer service. Give me somebody just to talk to and just they take care of the problem for me. Our job from a technology perspective is to say, how can you do that in a more efficient way? Take away the administrative task for me so that I can focus on customer relationship management, right? That's that's kind of the biggest quartet trend. As I think about that from a lifecycle, you'll see here's how I think about it. I kind of break it down into the sub components.
I would say number one, I would say is inspections, right? Condition report, it all starts in from a trend perspective. All starts, it starts there is do I, what is the car actually? What is the car actually worth? What condition is it? You know, and that is that's the big unknown, right? Like that's sometimes that's the piece that you spend. It's also something that dealers complain a lot about because it's extremely subjective. And it's really tough to operationalize and scale. I mean, I get people talking about condition reports all the time. Yeah. It is probably the thing that as I've gotten into this industry is probably the space that has a lot of time is spent on. And I like what you just said, you'll see about subjective. It is. That's what I keep hearing. And ultimately you can build a perfect mouse trap. But ultimately it's being executed by a person. And if that person is not fully trained or doesn't do a good job, it doesn't matter what you do. Right. So, so I mean, that is a huge space. I would say the trends I'm seeing continuing as you think, you know, I've talked about technology trends in other places, for example, artificial intelligence. This is where I think I see a huge trend and a focus here is how do you take that subjectivity out? Because at the end of the day, the, the condition of a car is somewhat binary. Like it's not a question. Like the reality is you should be able to, it's like, it's pretty binary. You get like zeros and ones. You can do, you know, the body condition, you know, the mechanical condition. You should be able to get it. If you have the right data, you can translate that. It's about getting that right data and then translating the data.
So I would say that the first big trend, I would say is using more data, you're getting collecting data. I see a future of saying, how do we get more data? And some of this, by the way, data actually even exists through like, through different devices that exist, we have, there's more and more data existing about a car right now. So using that data to essentially get to a place where you can get the inspections, the right inspection for the right car with full transparency is probably the first area. And I, I think that's one of the areas you'll see we are also investing. And in fact, we just launched something called Visual Boost AI, which was really what it is. Is it looks at a car and it does a, we, we take pictures of it, you know, the regular picture you take of a car. And it actually looks at the looks of those pictures and finds it draws polygons around damages. So it actually, it's, it finds all the damages that are on the car. And then we, we actually have it checked by the inspector. So, so that's like a first for you. So I think that's going to be a huge space.
Before you go on to the second thing, right, just to build on top of that. So what is that going to mean for our industry? Or like I said, dealers have historically complained a ton about condition reports. I've dealt with this myself firsthand. Do you see a world here that we're approaching where condition reports will be accurate to the point where, you know, as dealers really ultimately, the result is you have more confidence in your purchase. You're likely willing to pay more money because you know what you're getting. You're taking less risk, right? It's everything's done more, you know, faster, right? Like, is that, is that going to be reality? How far are we away from that? The answer to that is yes, 100% yes. It's not a question of if it's a question of when. Because this is all data that exists. It's just about finding the most efficient way of collecting the data. And as we are already showing, proving with this visual, visual boost AI, it drives a better outcome.
Let me give you a stat, right? We launch visual boost AI. And since the time we've launched it, it's only days till it's only been out there for about six months. In the time we've launched it, there was a concern. By the way, when we launched it, there were some sellers who are like concerned about it. They're saying, you know what, it's going to actually get, it's going to not sell my cars. It's not, it's not going to, you know, people are going to get scared. And as a result, they're going to because they're going to see more damages. And you know what we found? And we, we wanted to test it. We are a test and loan culture. So we tested it. We piloted it. And then we've launched it now. And the consistent data we found is buyers using the visual boost AI feature. They tend to be, we almost see a three X increase in view to bid ratio.
We need to say, I look at it and it increases my confidence for all the reasons, because now I know what I'm seeing and that actually increases the ability and the willingness for me to actually replace a bid. OK, so just, just to recap that. So you're talking about dealers using your app or making purchases. They're using this one piece of software on your app. And that's translating to three X higher view to bid ratio. Correct. Correct. Is it because it increases that confidence, right? It increases the willingness to believe. So what? And so actually what we're finding is it's a, it's a positive benefit. So this goes to your point of firstly, when you ask the question of how will it transform the industry, the first question is, does it solve a problem? And is it ultimately, does it create value for me as a seller? And does it create value for me as a buyer? Right. So you're the two sides to marketplace. The simple answer that we're seeing, it creates value as a buyer. Right. Because I get more confidence, it creates value as a seller, because I'm actually getting more activity on those cars.
So you're, you're, you're creating the flywheel starts operating better. So I think it's not a question of if it's just a question of when and we just have to prioritize and continue building out more data around these condition reports. Mm hmm. Yeah. And I do want to ask you about what are the best dealers doing on your platform? Like I'm curious how they're transacting. But before we get to that, I want you to finish your thought on the trends. Right. So you mentioned the first trend of yours leveraging AI in, in for inspections, right? Making them more seamless. Any other trends, any, any other major shifts happening behavior? I think the, the, the second shift is this marketplace ship of what was a shift off, you know, when I'm actually doing wholesale, it's shop my way or shop your way. I would like to say, right? And, you know, this is, this is a very simple idea. One of the interesting things we've found and we've had different formats and you've obviously done different acquisitions and worked.
所以,你,你,你在创造飞轮效应,使其更有效地运转。所以我认为这不是是否的问题,而是时间的问题。我们只需要优先考虑并继续围绕这些状况报告构建更多数据。嗯哼。是的,我确实想问一下在你们平台上最好的经销商在做什么。我很想知道他们是怎么交易的。但在我们聊到这个之前,我想让你先完成你关于趋势的想法。对的,你提到了第一个趋势是利用 AI 进行检查,使流程更加顺畅。还有其他趋势或行为上的重大变化吗?我认为,第二个变化是市场模式的转变,这是从批发转向个性化购物的变化,我喜欢这么说。而且,你知道,这是一个非常简单的想法。我们发现了一些有趣的事情,我们有不同的格式,而且你显然也做了不同的收购并进行了相应工作。
One of the interesting things is there's no, there's not a one I am here to use. My, I'm going to be a little geek out on you and use my Lord Ring analogy of one ring to rule them all. Right. There isn't a one ring to rule them all solution when it comes to, to marketplaces. Right. It's, it's really what we found from our data is different consumers like shopping and in different ways. If you talk to some of our dealers who participate in our auction format, our two hour auction formats, right, they'll tell you like, it's the best thing ever. They're like, I can't believe I can, I can't, I know that it's, it's on a certain day. I know it's for a certain time. I know the outcome I prepare for it. I manage it. And that's the way I want to show. That's the way I want to sell or a buyer saying that's the way I want to buy. Right.
And then there are others who are saying that's crazy. That's like a time, I can't manage my time like that. Like, you know what, if I, I'll, I'll do what I need to do. And maybe at eight o'clock in the evening on a Friday, because that's when I have the time to do it and you have to need, meet that need. So a big trend out here is I think, and this is one of the things that really another reason why digital is so important. You see is why, because it enables you to quickly iterate and develop experiences based on customer needs. So I think that we are, we're not, I don't think there is one size fit solution. I think we're going to want to see that explode.
When I was, you know, putting up our first reconditioning center, right? Cause we were used car operation. So, you know, we were all about streamlining that. I mean, it took, it took a long time, probably like a year and a half, two years, you know, zoning, all these things. But then now, I mean, what I'm doing today, it's crazy. Right. Like we come up with an idea. It's shipped within 24 hours. So it's super permissionless permissionless, which is a, which is pretty nice when it comes to your point, like iterating on customer feedback. So anyways, that's a sidebar though. You're, you're about to mention the third trend.
I would say the third thing that I've seen, and this one is really as I've launched the industry, it's become very apparent, especially with franchise dealer groups, right? You have, you have, you have a corporate entity and then you have individual rooftops. And one of the things that has been interesting is this dichotomy or this, this battle between centralized decision making and the benefits of, you know, and the efficiencies that bring out and decentralization, giving the rooftops, the autonomy to make that decisions because they understand market conditions best.
Right. And I do think a big trend I'm seeing is trying to bridge that gap. Like does it really need to be an or decision or can it be an and decision? So how do you build solutions that enable a certain amount of command and control, right? Where, where, from a corporate perspective, you have view and you can advise and you can, you can assist and you can direct, but at the same time, enable the individual stores to also have the autonomy and to, to exercise their judgment because they know the customer is the best. They're closest to the customer.
So I think there is a huge trend around figuring that piece out that I think we're on the cuspop. So that enterprise innovation space is another big area or end trend. I think that's very interesting. Tell me, tell me a little bit about given, given the positionary and, you know, having access to all this data and transactions. What are you seeing right now from an economic perspective, like just talking to me a little bit about pricing trends in the market, where are we at in the cycle? Right. Give us some kind of insight behind the scenes. What's happening? You know, it's super interesting. Again, as fairly new to an industry, it's like, wow. Where do I begin? It's like, so let me talk about the two things. Like I said, open lane.
One of the things about open lane is we have, you know, we do 1.3 million cars. We sell 1.3 million cars and it's about a 50 50 split between commercial and dealer cars, like little known fact, we manage over 70% of the off-lease portfolio that exists in the, in the industry, which gives us incredible insights into actually what's not just what's going on right now, but what's likely to happen. Cause we actually know those cars that are maturing and what's likely going to happen. Right. So we have the dealer information and we have the commercial information.
And one of the things on the off-lease side of it, you'll see that's really interesting is we, you get to, they come on the digital assets. So there's actually exclusive on our sites first before it actually flows down into any other, any, any other auction. Right. So we get that access to the data for us. So let's talk about it from both those lenses. Here's what I would say is what we're seeing. What's interesting though, and this is looking at our own data, the gap between seller expectations, right? What the seller expects from a pricing perspective. And we know that because we know what the seller sets as they resolve and how far they go down versus what the buyers are willing to pay, which really boils down to what buyers are bidding. And then what do they end up buying? That gap is actually increasing.
So pricing is coming down, but I would say, so buyers are expecting to pay less and less. Sellers are still holding on to inventory. So from a macro trend, some of this, of course, there's been supply constraints and there still are in certain cases. But I think that's going to continue to change. What's driving that? Like, is that being driven by a more new car supply that's driving down prices? Or, I mean, something that's been on my mind a lot, right? And I was like, have the CDK outages impacted this as well? And to what extent? Like, what's your hypothesis here? You know, I definitely a lot of different macroeconomics. You talk about noise right now, you'll see, like trying to unpack what the drivers are is really, really hard because it feels a little bit like a perfect storm. You've got interest rates are high. You've got new car. You're right. New car supply is increasing in certain cases. And the amount of promotions in those cars also increasing, right?
So, we're seeing that activity starting to return. So that's definitely a factor. There's probably a lot of people who made purchases over the last few months, expecting certain things and bought at a high level. And now they're hoping that they're underwater and they're hoping to sell those cars at a higher price. So there's hope is, I would say, certainly one of the hypothesis is that people are hoping that things come back because it has been so tumultuous. It has, we've seen these spikes and changes over time.
I think you asked about CDK. Let me just start up by saying, certainly we're not experts on the whole CDK side. What we have heard though, consistently from dealers is that that that the issue, they see it as a blip and eventually that volume is going to come back. So it's not gone. It's not like that has disappeared. I would agree with that. Yeah. I mean, it hasn't been like months, right? It's been going to cap up at about a little bit over two weeks. So, you know, that's, I think it's not, I'm no economist here, but just, you know, if you look at auction trends, it doesn't seem like, you know, it's enough to be really disruptive to the, to the wholesale market.
And I think it's worth mentioning that, you know, we're, it's obviously as good of news as could possibly be that CDK was able to get their hands wrapped around this relatively quickly. And that, you know, I mean, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dealership employees and millions of total employees, right, between adjacent companies that were impacted. So massive, massive disruption that, you know, really no one could have predicted. So pretty crazy, but it's good to hear you say that, you know, that values haven't been disrupted, you know, so severely just yet. Because that's a promising sign, right? At least it signals some stability. So that's obviously a good thing.
Yeah, absolutely. Um, the other piece I just wanted to kind of add in. So I know I talked about, you talked about pricing and I know I'm kind of going around a little bit is the other piece of data we have is awfully data, right, which is kind of interesting for us. So we actually try to track what is called, obviously the equity gap, which is the difference between residual values and market values, right? And that's a real lead indicator. This is a kind of interesting chart. It's a fun one to watch for me as I've come into this industry is like, you know, back in 2019 pre COVID, typically your market values, why they're at residual or slightly lower, in fact, you know, through COVID, that fundamentally shifted, right? Where at one point in early 22, 22, there was almost a $20,000 gap where the market values were significantly higher than residual. That's been dropping, right? That has been dropping over time, especially in the last year. I would say in the last three months, what's interesting as we watch it. It's stabilized a little bit so that gap has dropped, but it's stabilized a little bit. It doesn't dropping anymore. So it'll be interesting.
Now, some of that on the on the off-lease portfolio, of course, we're also getting to a place where, you know, COVID impact on lease volumes also being impacted. So there are a lot of moving pieces on that, but that's likely going to also have an impact on on pricing going forward is the amount of off-lease inventory that's available as well.
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That's CDG.News. And check us out. We're all yours for your feedback. Tell us what you need. Give us your honest thoughts. We're here to deliver real value. But don't wait at to CDG.News now or click the link in the show. All right, shiv, great insights today. So before we close up, I mean, how does openly in 10x from here? What's the what's the grandmaster plan? Man, I like the I like the 10x number. I'm almost afraid to answer this. Peter's going to hold me to it. Well, let's, yeah, let's look.
I would say we need to. If there's anything we've learned is you need to be courtier principles, courtier strategy and double down on it, right? We are very, very clear. We want to make wholesale easy. OK, that's our goal. To do that, I would say there are really five tenets that we got to really deliver on five. OK. Number one is enable customers to shop your way. Right. We have three formats. We're going to continue to in until iterate, learn from those formats, learn from customers and enable them to sell their way to buy their way when they want, how they want in the right way. We just launched absolute sale. We're seeing huge benefits. I want to one of the benefits outside it. I told you, I think I mentioned it's it's almost 40% of our business. One of the important things on that is it's driving almost incremental. Five hundred dollars in value retention for dealers. That's real money. Right. So that's why it matters. And for buyers, it's saving them time. We're going to continue enabling shop your way and enabling formats and improving our formats.
Number two, scale. Right. An effective marketplace needs all the buyers, all the sellers, all the inventory in one place. That's that's the model. That's a marketplace model. We're well on our way. I think I mentioned we have 1.3 million cars. We have dealer cars and commercial cars. The commercial cars are largely exclusive to us. You can only buy them on open lane. We're going to continue to grow that. We have different businesses. We're bringing unifying all these businesses and with that way, unifying our dealers. We have over 50,000 dealers that are shopping at over 200,000 units of inventory that we list on a monthly basis. And that scale is important because that means that my time is well spent. When I come to open lane.com, I know the inventories that I know the buyers that I know the sellers are there. And that's important. Talk about saving time, making it easy. Everybody needs to be there.
Number three, speed. It's critical. Time is man, man. Like one thing I've learned is dealers don't not have the time. I watched the dealer the other day and they talked about, hey, in this environment, they were cutting 10% of their stuff and the use. Com manager was not wearing three hats. They're buying, they're selling, they're, they're helping out with other administrative work. We have to get them to a point where things are fast. So, open lane is dedicated to that. And we look, we track everything. So for example, even an inspection, like we measure it not in, not just in minutes, we measure in minutes and seconds. So we've got it down to a point where we try to get our inspection is like about 12 minutes. I want to say 58 seconds. I mean, I'm quoting that number. That's how precise we want to be. We want to drop that down. What that means is when we go and inspect within that timeframe, that car is available to buy and sell on the marketplace and we have to buy on the marketplace, right?
You've done the inspection and so there on the marketplace, but it's not just that. We got to make the process of buying foster. So today it takes about a day to for a car to sell on our on our on our marketplace. We want to make it faster. We want to be able to find the right buyer, right seller and sell it. The time for the car to be picked up from a lot, right? Because your lots are full. You want to be retailing. You don't want the wholesale car. Once you've sold a car, you want it gone, right? And that can range right now from anywhere from like a day to as many as three to four days, depending on where the location is. We got to bring that down. If I sell the car, it needs to be off my lot. And then as a buyer, it may, I need to be able to get that far.
So that entire wholesale transaction that that time we need to be on the forefront of saving time, we're already on an average based on anecdotal evidence and our history, we're about two to five X faster than physical auctions in a whole wholesale time. That's real money. That's that's that's depreciation. So we need to continue to invest in speed, which takes me to I talked about depreciation, lower cost, right? So talked about it. We are committed to digital, which means we're asset light, which means that money we're saving, we're investing in technology and lower fees, right? Number one.
Number two, we are going to arbitrations. We have some of the lowest arbitration rates in the industry. How are you achieving that? I honestly believe because we are investing in condition reports. We believe that honestly, believe that when somebody buys, we try to transparency is critical. You know what you're buying. You know the seller you're buying from. And that's important because that enables you to build trust, which means when I get what I want, I believe in that. And so I don't need to go and arbitrate. So it's we are saving and that's real money, right? That's that's money that you're saving.
And then the other piece around cost is also dealer productivity, right? If you think about it from a dealer perspective and I again, I was talking to dealer, I was at about a month or so ago and they mentioned something. They said, you know, I love digital, roll wholesaling because in the old days, I had my guy go to an auction at 11 in the morning and then he's gone for the full day. Like he's pretty much done. Now it's like, hey, I know the auctions there. Two hours, I'm done. I know about the outcomes. I get all the data. I get all the reports. I'm done, which means they're doing other things. That's real cost. So people cost is also in sense. So we need to continue to reduce costs, right? High are ultimately we need to be driving higher retention values and everything our innovation to be able to if we find the right bio and the right, there's, I learned a long time and there's no such thing as a bad product. It's just a bad price. And if you find the right buy and the right seller, you can drive higher retention. And let's just define that. You said our pool, which I'm just going to guess you're saying average revenue per unit. It's just a guess. That's average revenue per unit. That's right. All right. So for anyone wondering average already per unit, I've had a fair share of acronyms through my career. So I can put two and two together by now. Yeah. That's when you know, that's when you know you'll see that I've been in the industry now long enough when I'm starting to throw acronyms out. You see this is just like us when I tell you, like there's certain things. I'm like, wow, like I didn't even think about that. But I'm like, wait, our pool. So I like it.
Yeah. And then finally I would end by saying transparency. I've already mentioned it's transparent. We're going to continue investing in transparency. All right. We want to make it. We want to make we want to make this as transparent and clean a process as possible. I want we want buyers to be able to trust the products they're selling sellers to be able to trust, trust is everything. And ultimately, if we do these things that I just talked about again, shop your way, right? Multiple formats, scale, speed, cost in our pool, lower cost, higher our pool and transparency. If we do these five things, we start making wholesale easy.
And if we make wholesale easy, we enable our dealers to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on building relationships. If we do that, that creates what I call a product moat, which means that creates a solution. And when you have a product moat, that's when you 10x your business. Well, put my friend, Shiv. Thanks for joining me on the podcast. It's great to have you on. Thank you. Thanks a lot. You'll see this was a pleasure. I appreciate you having me. All right. Hope you enjoyed that episode. Please give the podcast a rating. Consider subscribing to the show and check the show notes for links to what we talked about. Thanks for tuning in. I'll see you guys next time.