When I look to the future, I think the market of the future is going to be much more of what we think about a normal market than maybe for the last two years. And by that I mean franchise dealers will tend to have plenty of vehicles on their lots, new cars, manufacturers will offer incentives to move those vehicles in the way that they did, but maybe they haven't done as much in the last few years.
So they'll be incentives, they'll be lease incentives, all that kind of stuff. We'll probably see a more robust wholesale market. Meaning that when dealers take, when franchise dealers take car in on trade, they'll probably wholesale a good percentage of those rather than thinking, well my lot's empty, I'm going to hang on to all these trades. I think the whole sale goes.
When consumers get to the end of their leases, they'll find there's not much equity in that lease. I'm going to return that car and put it into the wholesale market. So I think we'll see more of that again in the future than we've seen over the last couple of years.
What's up everyone? This is Car D'Oeship Guy. You're listening to the Car D'Oeship Guy podcast, which is my effort to give you access to the most unbiased and transparent insights into the car market. Let's get into today's episode.
Peter Kelly is the CEO of Openlane, an international auction platform that makes wholesale easy for dealers. In this conversation we discussed, going from Irish farmer to founding a digital car auction platform, Openlane's recent acquisition of Manheim, Canada, Peter's predictions for the car market, the future of automotive wholesale, arbitrage and Canadian vehicles in the US.
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I'm just reading through some things. I saw Irish Farm to Construction Career, Stanford MBA incubating the original open land. I'll just take a pause there. Can you give us the whole story? How do we get here?
Yeah, well, first of all, delighted to be here. Yeah, a little interesting journey. As you said, grew up on a farm in the west of Ireland. I enjoyed that a lot. You know, did a lot of farm work as a kid. I think I learned the value of hard work there. But, you know, in my school years, I did pretty well. I ended up going to college doing an engineering science degree.
And when I graduated, I kind of wanted to go leave the country as I went to the UK. I worked in construction. In the UK, building infrastructure projects, a ton of fun. You know, worked with a lot of blue collar workers and immigrants and all sorts of folks in London and various parts of England and Wales, a little bit in Scotland. You know, love that.
Started actually doing a little bit more in technology to help me be more productive in my job. So that's kind of where I started learning about technology. And I guess one thing or another, I got more interested in entrepreneurship, technology. And I thought, man, if I could get out to Silicon Valley to Stanford, that would be a cool thing to do. So I thought, well, I'll apply. And I was fortunate enough to get in. So got in.
While I was there, I teamed up with a couple of guys and we said, you know, it's a dot com era. This was 1998, 99 timeframe. A lot of businesses getting started around there and a lot of disruption going on. We were looking at technology auctions. How could we disrupt different industries? One of the guys had a sort of automotive idea. And as we dug in, this open lane vision kind of took place.
And I can remember one day we went to a large auction out in the Bay Area, physical auction. And that was a real eye opening day for me because going to that auction, seeing 100 acres of cars, maybe a thousand dealers attending 12 different lanes and the intensity of an auction day, pre technology, really, pre simulcast. Maybe early simulcast. And we just felt, man, this is an industry. The internet is going to change this industry. It'll be fun to be part of making that change. And that's kind of what we did.
And what did you really do? I mean, what was the original open lane? You know, the original open lane, what we were trying to do was take that whole physical auction and move it online. We felt, why do you need to move the car to a location? Why does the dealer have to come to that location? Can't you just inspect that car, take photos of that car, wherever it is, put it up on the internet and have dealers log on on eBay had just gone public.
So into an eBay style auction was our vision and sell the car and cut out a lot of costs to make it more efficient, create, you know, a national market. That was kind of the vision. You know, but I also think back to then, you know, it was pre smartphone. Dial up modem. It was a very different world, right? You know, so the core of the idea made sense. A lot of the necessary components probably weren't really there. So it took a long time to come to fruition.
I mean, you were early. I got to say, people probably thought you were crazy. I'd have to imagine. Yeah, we probably were a little crazy. We were early. Yeah, we had a couple of tough years, but you know, we got some traction with a few OEMs who were interested in building these private label solutions for their dealers to sell their off lease cars. So we thought, well, we can use our technology for that. So we got into that and, you know, one customer led to another and yeah, we had some ups and downs, but generally the business grew and the technology caught up a little bit.
The second guest I ever had on this podcast was Christopher Coleman, founder of Carlypso, who then went on to find with Clark. Similar story to you in that, you know, Stanford grads, you know, very intrigued by the auto business. And we're focused sort of on wholesale, but their vision was to sort of do wholesale direct to consumer didn't quite work out. They ended up really things did end up working out for them personally. I got acquired by Carvana. I went on to do great things, but yeah, it's interesting. It's on a similar vision.
Yeah, I know, I know Christopher, I met him, I haven't met him for a few years, but I know him from back to the end. Yeah, I figure it. That's awesome.
Were you the first digital auction, like Simon cast aside, which was meant to take a traditional auction and digitize it, correct me from wrong, but were you the first, you know, fully digital auction attempt?
I would say we were certainly one of the first. There were a few others. Some of them ended up getting rolled up into our company over the next few years. There was a company in Canada called on lane. There was a company based in Phoenix called Auto Trade Center. They all sort of we kind of combined with those companies over, you know, a three or four year period. And then there were a few companies that didn't make it. So there was a five or six, I'd say entrance in that sort of year or two year period back then. But then there was a winnowing out of that as the business sort of evolved.
36 hours ago, you guys made a really big announcement. You announced that you are acquiring all of Manheim, Canada and the associated assets and you'll get into that in a second. One of the questions I got from many dealers was simply like confusion about what is open lane, you know, who is open lane. So before we even get into what you're working on, can you give us just like a lay of the land, explain your company's branding, what you do, the different components of the company?
Yeah, I understand that. First of all, open lane is an independent publicly traded company. Okay. So we're owned by our shareholders. If anybody in this podcast wants to buy a share, they can. On the public markets. We're not owned or controlled by any other company or affiliated with any other company. We're blessed by having customers across this entire industry from the biggest OEMs to thousands of franchise dealers, thousands of independent dealers. We love this industry and our purpose, the reason we exist is to make the wholesale process easy so our customers give them more success.
So what are we? We're the leading, I would say digital marketplace for used vehicles. We're going to sell about 1.3 million vehicles this year. Okay, so it's a lot of vehicles. All of those vehicles are bought by dealers. Okay. And half of those vehicles are sold by dealers. So it's again a wholesale marketplace. And the other half of this, the volume we sell will be sold by commercial customers, finance companies, OEMs, rental companies, and so forth. Most of that volume is in North America, the majority of the US, but we have a strong presence in Canada. We'll talk about that here later. And we also then own a finance company called AFC, which I know many of your audience will be familiar with. That's one of the leading floor plan companies for independent dealers. We floor plan with them many years ago, but we floor plan with them until the point we didn't need the floor plan anymore.
Yeah, so that's the company. Now, there has been a lot of change. We did divest of the Odessa business in the US last year. We've grown a lot by acquisition. And over the past, I'll say 24 months, we've been integrating digital platforms into one common platform. We've had car wave, back in cars, now all integrated into an open lane brand in the US. And in Canada, we had a decentrade rev integrated into an open lane brand in Canada. So, I'm excited that we finished this year with one brand, which is open lane in all our marketplaces, US, Canada, and we have some business in Europe. And excited for the future here.
是的,那就是我们公司的情况。现在,公司发生了很多变化。去年,我们剥离了美国的奥德萨业务。我们通过并购实现了很大的增长。在过去的24个月里,我们一直在将数字平台整合到一个共同的平台中。我们曾经有过Car Wave和Back In Cars,现在它们都整合到了美国的一个品牌Open Lane中。而在加拿大,我们将Decentrade Rev整合到了加拿大的一个品牌Open Lane中。所以我很高兴今年以Open Lane作为我们所有市场的品牌结束。我们在美国、加拿大和欧洲都有业务。对未来充满期待。
Tell me more about this acquisition, right? You recently sold Odessa US a couple years back to Carvana. I think many people listen to this know that. So, why buy Manheim Canada so soon after selling Odessa US?
Yeah, well, a number of reasons. Canada is a core market for us. We've got a strong market position in Canada. Again, formerly trade-driven Odessa, but now open lane. And our business in Canada, I would say, is a combination of physical footprint. We have, I think, 13 sites across Canada from coast to coast. But also a very strong digital platform. All the cars we sell are sold digitally, online. We don't run the traditional across the block in lane auction any longer. So, we sell a lot of cars that never come to our facilities. We sell a lot of cars from our facilities. But they're all sold digitally.
Manheim was a competitor in Canada. I guess one thing I'd say is that over the last number of years, there's been a migration of volume from purely physical to a digital, more format. Cars that used to come to a physical auction no longer do. They're sold from the dealers' lots on a digital platform. So, we've seen that in our facilities in Canada. So has Manheim. Cox Automotive divested of some businesses last year in Canada.
And when I saw that, I thought perhaps they were thinking of exiting the Canadian market entirely. So, that initiated a discussion with them around their physical business. And frankly, as I said the other day on an investor call, it enabled us in each market to sort of consolidate facilities to record the market. And then we had to create facilities to create greater scale and efficiency. Because the reality is we had facilities that were not full and not fully utilized and so did they. And this gets a chance to kind of consolidate the volume and have a more efficient sort of physical footprint for the business that actually exists in Canada. Given that we've had a lot of digital change.
Got it. So you think you're going to get more operating leverage just by more demand filling up your lots and your facilities? I think there's more operating leverage. I'd also say that our digital offering in Canada in terms of a number of buyers was just a lot stronger than Manheim's in Canada. So, I think this also has benefits for Manheim customers. It's going to put those vehicles in front of a greater audience of buyers. And for our buyers, it's also beneficial because now they're going to have access to even greater numbers of vehicles. So, in all of those kind of benefits as well.
But fundamentally, the industry has been evolving. It's been moving away from a purely physical model towards a more digital model. You know that you see that on your media empire. That's very evident based on the comments that we see. And I think this transaction kind of reflects that. It's just sort of an evolution of that.
You have physical auctions, you have dealer dealer marketplaces, backlot cars and plenty of other services you offer. Do you think that the future is a blend of the two? Or do you think that the industry is trending in one direction versus another? I think the future, no matter what industry you're in, is going to be more digital than it was in the past. Just if we look at the next generation, my kids coming up, the way more digital I ever was, new people entering the industry are more digital than people who entered 20 years ago. So, I think pick your industry. It's going to be more digital in the future. I think that's true of our industry too. I think both have a role to play.
But when I think of what companies I openly offer today, so we can go inspect a vehicle anywhere at any dealership or any other facility. We can inspect a vehicle quickly and inexpensively. We can put that vehicle into a digital marketplace immediately. It'll immediately attract interest from buyers and bids. It can be sold that day and it can be delivered tomorrow. That's incredibly efficient. That's just an incredibly efficient engine. It benefits the seller. It benefits the buyer. And I just think that's going to win the day, long run in this industry.
I've seen that play out in the off-least space, which is where Open Lane started. We started with off-least customers selling off-least vehicles. And when we started, we were selling 20% of the cars that the seller was posting. And then 15 years later, it was 60% of the cars. So, I see that now playing out in the dealer to dealer realm. Franchise dealers can now sell directly from their lot through services like ours. It's convenient. It's fast. It's efficient. So, I'm just a believer in that. And then as CEO of the company, you've got to make choices on where do we commit our resources? And I'd rather commit our resources into that part of the industry where I think we're going to see the growth and where we're going to have the most positive impact for our customers. And that's what we're doing.
What do you think that positive impact is? What do you think is the key to a successful auction at your scale? What do dealers really want? Yeah. It's a good question. I go back to our purpose statement, make wholesale easy so our customers can be more successful. Our customers are businesses. They live and die on the numbers on their financial performance at the end of every month and quarter. I recognize that.
Wholesale is important for our customers, but usually it's not their core business. Dealers, core business is probably retailing cars. Wholesale is important for the excess trades you have and for sourcing vehicles if you're an independent dealer. But it's not the core business. The core business is retail. If you're an OEM, the core business is manufactured and merchandising. Wholesale is important. We need to make it easy. And that's what we sort of. That's why I try and emphasize with our team every single day.
So what really matters to the seller? What matters to our sellers is, can you sell a high percentage of my cars? Can you sell it fast? Can you get market price? Right? And get it off my lot quickly. I think those kind of attributes. And for a buyer, can you offer me a broad selection of inventory? Can you be easy to do business with? The prices need to be reasonable. I mean, we don't set the prices on the vehicles. We're just the marketplace. But the fees need to be reasonable. You need to have condition reports I can trust. You know, all of these types of things. But I think you can. We just still all that down into the word sort of easy. The process has to be easy and painless for the customers. We've got to be a company our customers can trust to do business. We've got to trust the condition reports, so on and so forth. So that's the area we really focus on.
Listen, I think it's a journey. I think we're better than we've ever been before at it. We hope to be better next year than we're this year. And then obviously we try and do it at a very competitive price, fee structure, etc. And I think we compare very well on that front too. I did a podcast a couple months back with Bob Hollandtad. And I don't know if you got exposed to that one, but I highly recommend it. All about auction business to come up very, very, very entertaining and interesting. I should listen to that. I know Bob. I didn't hear that podcast, but I've met Bob on a number of occasions. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll send that to you after we finish this.
You mentioned. I forget the exact number you mentioned, but the millions of transactions you oversee. Annually, what is your take right now on consumers, not a motive in terms of just supply, demand, affordability? How do you think about that? Yeah. You know, the world out there is changing again pretty rapidly right now. And I hesitate to predict because the last few years have been so difficult to predict. I think we're all kind of humbled by. I say my crystal ball is very murky. I can't really see into it very well. But why are we seeing? I kind of think that when we look back, we'll think that these last few years were kind of an anomaly. The pandemic supply disruption caused a massive run up in new car prices, used car prices, and all the implications of that. And I think we're seeing that sort of unwind right now. There's an affordability issue with used vehicles and new vehicles, right? Prices are high, interest rates are high. And the consumer can't show up. I don't think, or a lot of consumers can't show up and make that work. And I think something's going to have to give there, which is either interest rates need to come down a little bit, which could happen. Or used vehicle prices will remain under pressure, which they are right now. So, you know, I think that's one thing. I think affordability at the consumer level is important.
What about your customers? Well, our customer, our customer then is the dealer, right? You know, here's what I'd say is dealers. The one thing I've got to be like super impressed with with dealers, given my 20 plus years now in the business, dealers are extremely resilient. Right? Dealers in that sort of 20 plus year period, they've encountered all sorts of markets, good markets, recessions, pandemics. And they figure it out.
You know, I think dealers offer a very valuable and necessary service, whether it's franchise dealers or independent dealers. They support the supply chain of new and used vehicles and their entrepreneurs. And, you know, they figure out how to make it work. I think there probably are some challenges that a declining price environment is tough when you hold inventory. So, you know, if used vehicles are depreciating, you want to be really sort of mindful about how much inventory you're holding, don't hold it too long, you know, all that sort of stuff. And we have to be mindful about that as well, because we finance many of those dealers, right, on the independent dealer side, right?
But I guess if I had to sort of distill it all down, I'd say, when I look to the future, I think the market of the future is going to be much more of what we think about a normal market than maybe for the last two years have been. And by that I mean franchise dealers will tend to have plenty of vehicles on their lots, new cars, manufacturers will offer incentives to move those vehicles in the way that they did, but maybe they haven't done as much in the last few years. So, they'll be incentives, they'll be lease incentives, all that kind of stuff.
We'll probably see a more robust wholesale market, meaning that when dealers take, when franchise dealers hit car and on trade, they'll probably wholesale a good percentage of those, rather than thinking, well, my lot's empty, I'm going to hang on to all these trades. I think they'll wholesale those. When consumers get to the end of their leases, they'll find there's not much equity in that lease. I'm going to return that car and put it into the wholesale market. So, I think we'll see more of that again in the future than we've seen over the last couple of years.
It feels like we're in the unwind period still at this point, because you're seeing on one hand, Stellantis, Chrysler, Dodge, EPRAM, etc. They have lots are packed, incentives are starting and continuing to increase. On the other hand, I'm getting consumers who every day write to me, hey, I'm looking for a grand highlander hybrid or Toyota Sienna and I just can't get it still. And it's very much that, you know, very, you know, case-shaped recovery, however you want to call it, where some brands are still doing, you know, very good with supply. Others are still lacking and it's that, you know, in between stage still.
They went as high as 50% up versus pre-pandemic and I think they've come down maybe 20%. So, today they're about 30% higher. My guess is they come down a little bit more, but I don't think they're ever going to go back to where they were. But it has been inflation, right? The dollar in our pockets actually worth less today than it was then. And there's been a deficit of cars produced, right? Structurally for the last two, three and a half years to three years, there's just been fewer new cars built. And that's a deficit of used cars, right? So I think all that kind of supports values and prevents them from going all the way back to where they were. But again, I think we're still in a little bit of an unwinding, a little bit more unwinding to do, probably.
Yeah, and you mentioned inflation. I mean, cost to produce a car went up. And so structurally, the entire market is buoyed like that. Tell me more. I think you were mentioning, we were talking about your operations in Canada, your expansion. You're just looking for your different brands. I was even surprised. Some brands that I wasn't aware of. But, you know, many, many different brands offering lots of services throughout the industry. Why do you look abroad for value? Where does that, you know, what drives that? You're mentioning you're also very acquisitive, which makes, you know, makes a lot of sense. But tell me about like looking abroad. What drives that decision?
I guess what I'd say is we have been a inquisitive. I mean, I've been CEO for two years. I've maybe been a little less acquisitive and more focused on the integration of the businesses we have.
We do have a business in Europe. It's now called open lane Europe. And it's doing quite well. It's growing. It's definitely a contributor. I'm glad we own the business. I think it was a good deal, a good acquisition for us. But I will say my focus is very much North American based. More than 90% of the cars we sell are in North America. Frankly, the environment in North America has been a challenge, right? In the wholesale space. There's just been fewer vehicles for the last few years. So we've been challenged there. We've been working through that. That's been my focus. And that's going to continue to be my focus.
You're right. There aren't a ton of synergies between North American and Europe, which I mean. You know, European buyers aren't logging into our marketplace in North American buying cars and taking them over there. And neither is the opposite happening, right? So they're very distinct, separate geographies. So you're into the realm of like technology synergies and business model synergies. But I'm glad we own the business we own, but my focus is clearly on North America.
On that point, so you mentioned European buyers are not looking at North American cars, which makes total sense of when expect otherwise. Do you think just American dealers and American market in general, do you think they should be looking towards Canadian vehicles for potentially better value? Is there that arbitrage there? What do you think about that?
Yeah. Well, so the reality is there is a healthy, well, in many years, there's a healthy cross-border trade. And it's typically of Canadian vehicles into the US market. I'm very familiar. Yeah. Okay. Got it. And those volumes have been very high these past few years, very high these past few years. The strength of the demand in the US, you know, the rapid appreciation of used vehicle values caused buyers to work and I get these vehicles. And so that was a real strong driver of Canadian market performance, I'd say in 2021, 2022. And then you mentioned the word unwinding a few months ago. I would say over the last few months, we've seen a real fall off in that as the US market has cooled. It's had a disproportionate impact in Canada because that demand, that extra demand, not only did the Canadian market cool, but then that extra demand also went away. So it took a double whammy, right?
So, but there's a bunch of businesses and you probably know some of them who do a great job of, you know, they purchase vehicles in Canada speculatively, you know, hundreds of them, thousands of them. They take them down to auctions in the US or digital platforms in the US and they obviously work, they change the odometer to miles and do get the legal process figured out and sell the cars down here. And I mean, there's full lanes full of Canadian vehicles. Yes. So that's, you know, I don't remember seeing that in like the earlier 2010s and then maybe I was just too young and, you know, in the industry, but I, for me, I felt like it started more around like the mid.
2010s and are these pick up? You're probably, well, it has ebbed and flowed. Exchange rate really matters, right? So I would say in the, in the aughts, the 2000 to 2010, there were some years there where there was very strong export volume. And then the Canadian dollar strengthened and almost got to parity for a while. And I think the export market kind of diminished. And then it built back up and then it really exploded through the pandemic. And that was sort of compressing again. So it comes in cycles.
Because you have additional embedded costs and whatnot. Exactly. Exactly. This change really matters. You know, obviously, and then the rest of demand in both markets matters as well.
Peter, I know you're super tight on time. Really appreciate you making this on a, you know, 12 to 24 hour notice. So we appreciate you coming on. So before we wrap up, I mean, just what is the future for Open Lane looking like? I'm sure we'll have many more conversations, but give us a little teaser.
You know, I'm very excited about the future, not just of the company, but of the industry. Love this industry. Listen, people need transportation. They need to get to work. They want that freedom that car ownership brings. So I think that's inherent in what we provide.
I think dealers are essential to everything this industry does. So we love serving dealers, franchise independent dealers in US and Canada. You know, wholesale volumes have been under pressure for the last few years. I think that's going to change. You mentioned the unwinding. I think that's going to put more vehicles into the wholesale channel over time. It's going to be slow and steady, but that's still good. Our business will grow.
And then I'm just excited about it more digital future for this industry. You know, we've got great platforms, great technologies, great team. And again, we're focused on leveraging those technologies to make the process easy for dealers. Make the wholesale process easy, help make dealers more successful. And that creates an exciting future for all of us, I hope, and I believe.
Well, Peter, thanks so much for coming on. If anyone wants to learn more about Open Lane, you can go to openlane.com. I just confirmed you definitely have the domain. So we're good there. And Peter, this was great. Thanks so much for making the time. You know, pleasure to have you on. Thanks, Cardi Dershope Guy. I'm excited to be on your podcast here. Thank you.
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.