The government said that next year they will reduce the incentive and the year after they're going to reduce it also. There's a saying in Canada, the government is the best car salesman. And after interviewing this dealer, I'm starting to think it's true. Today I'm speaking with Jimmy Hool, CEO of Group La Lier, a seven rooftop dealership group in Quebec. Don't forget to click subscribe so you never miss an episode. This episode is brought to you by Lotlinks and Experian. Jimmy Hool on the C2G podcast. Jimmy, welcome. Thanks, Yossi. You're loving me. It's really nice to be here to speak with you today. Good to have you on from representing the Lier up in Canada. You're the first Canadian dealer on the C2G podcast. How does it feel?
政府表示,明年他们会减少补贴激励,后年也会继续减少。加拿大有句俗话说,政府是最好的汽车销售员。和这位经销商采访后,我开始觉得这句俗话是对的。今天我在采访Group La Lier的CEO Jimmy Hool,这是一家位于魁北克,有七个分店的经销集团。别忘了点击订阅,这样你就不会错过任何一期节目。本期节目由Lotlinks和Experian赞助。Jimmy Hool做客C2G播客。欢迎你,Jimmy。谢谢你,Yossi。很高兴今天能和你在这里交流。很高兴你代表位于加拿大的Lier 来到我们节目。你是C2G播客的第一个加拿大经销商。感觉怎么样?
It's really nice. And to be honest, I've been listening to your podcast for maybe a year now. And when I spoke with John and you told me, you know, you're going to be the first one who speaks with Yossi. I'm like, wow, it's really nice. I couldn't even realize it. So super happy to be here. I love it and pumped to have you on. And truthfully, I don't know too much about the Canadian market other than the fact that, you know, everyone and their mother used to bring or still brings, you know, the Canadian trucks to Manheim, Pennsylvania auction here in Lancaster, PA. So that was my big exposure to the Canadian market in general.
Seeing those pickup trucks every single week at Manheim auction and wondering, can I buy these? Can I not buy these? Will they still be covered under a manufacturer's warranty? Will they not be? Will the banks finance them? Like these are the, I remember these thoughts going through my head and walking through those lanes. Yeah, usually I think you can buy them because, you know, all these trucks have been produced in the States. So that's why they're returning to their motherland. Yeah. Over time I learned that. So obviously a lot of money in that business. Actually, you know, we'll talk about that. I'm curious to hear your take on that. Well, look, lots of this costs, you know, I think in general, lots of people cares about how everything's functioning in the Canadian market.
I will tell you that I have a, I have a big Canadian audience, which is just not something that I expected as I've been growing cardio, but I've just, I've come to realize it because I have people that have reached out to me, Hey, can you share, you know, X, Y and Z for the Canadian market? It may, may be industry info, you know, insight, whatever it is. So I've kind of come to realize that, you know, it's actually likely a bigger market than I even thought of initially. And then I discovered a bunch of different groups. Of course, there's your group, my buddy, John from H. Greg and there's, you know, plenty of other groups. But anyways, that was really my, how I became more exposed to it. Your story, particularly is fascinating. And we'll get into that.
Can you start by telling us a little bit about yourself, how you got into this business? Yes. So I grew up not too far from Montreal. My dad is a farmer. I grew up on a farm with my, my two parents that are still together. My mom, she's the second generation in the business right now. So she was in the car business and my dad has been a farmer. And you know, since I was little, I always knew I wanted to be in the car business. That wasn't even a question for me. So I was really fortunate to go to a really nice school. I was really good at Mathematic Finance during my late years. People are starting to ask you what you want to do later. And you know, for me was clear, it was car sales, car dealerships. And in my school was paying me to go to the Canadian contest for Mathematic. You know, they bring all the best kids for every school in Mathematic. And you can win money. So I went, I think, two years in a row I won one year.
So my school was paying me to go to the Mat test for all the best kids in the province of Quebec. And when I told them I wanted to sell cars, they told me, you know, you can't do this. You know, you have to go in finance. You have to do something in Mathematic. You have to do something in this branch. And for me, it's never been a question. When I told my mom that I wanted to go in the family business, she told me, you know, you can do what you want, but you need to go to school first. Wow. So after I school, I went straight to college. And there's a program in Canada and the Georgian College for automotive business, automotive marketing. So I did three years there. And after I finished my last year in Northwood University in. I was just going to say Northwood University of Canada.
Yeah, but there you go. Yeah, it's. They're affiliate actually. So I finished up Northwood. And after that, that 21 years old, I started in the business. You know, I was started as a salesman. Just a couple of quick questions. Can you explain to anyone listening that's not familiar with Northwood? I can tell you, I sure as hell wasn't as an independent dealer. Can you explain what that is? Yeah, it's a business goal. You get your bachelor in business, but all the classes are oriented in the automotive industry. You have an accounting class that's really for dealerships. You have a dealership management system class. You have a marketing class that's really oriented for the automotive industry. So it really puts you in the business as soon as you go to college. And all the person that are in this class, they're people like you. Maybe half of the classes, you know, dealer kids, all they call them. And the other half are people that want to work in the industry. So that's really nice. And you get to meet a lot of people and it's been still my roommate from college that I met at the E works for me now. He's one of the GM and my stores.
Can you fast forward us through your entrance rise and where you currently are in like your your involvement in the car business? I know you run the entire Lile A group today, but can you just kind of run us through entrance rise and how you got to today? Yes. When I graduated in 2011, 2012, sorry, I went, we have dealerships in the Montreal area and we have dealerships in the Ottawa area. So when I graduated from college, I wanted to be in the family business, but I didn't want to be like close to family. Because you know, you always the kids, you know, you're the kid that got every exactly the purpose of dealership, grandmother as a dealership for me. So I wanted to be far from the family. So I went to Ottawa to work in the family stores there. So I was, you know, two hours away from home and I spent two years there. I worked as a salesman and after I worked as a sales manager. And in 2014, you know, we had a position in Montreal in Nevada where my family was and they told me, you know, Jimmy, it's time maybe for you to come back a little bit closer and maybe learn a little bit more about the administration side of the business. So I moved back home after two years and I did two years as a sales manager. And after I got, you know, my first store as a GM in 2016. And after that, you know, I was for Kia for the, I worked at the Kia stores for a couple of years. You know, so I saw the progression of Kia was, which was crazy in Canada. I started in 2012 with Kia and 2016 sales were going really, really well. My brother joined me in 2017. He joined me as a sales rep promote. I promoted him as a use car manager a couple of years later and I, we kind of grew together from from there. And I always knew I wanted to take over the business since then. And you know, we just, you know, we were good for selling cars and it's, it's how it made happen. So I was brought to you by latlings 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. Introducing latlings Sentinel, the first and only AI inventory management solution completely focused on predicting and mitigating your carryover risk. With a decade of machine learning optimization behind it, latling Sentinel allows dealers to launch separate strategies for each individual Vin and ensure they sell faster and more profitably. All this so you can turn cars seven to 10 days sooner and protect your margins. Stop accepting unnecessary risk and start controlling your inventory. Get the lot links effect with the lot link Sentinel visit lot links.com slash Sentinel to learn more or click the link in the show notes below.
Give us a little layer of the land of your business today, like store count, top line revenue. Yeah, so right now we are we have seven stores, four-handed dealerships and three-key stores. Last year we sold the 6,800 cars this year, we're getting 7,000 one-for-one, so one new car for one use car. We all sell approximately 1500 cars a year. We have revenues of approximately 300 million. You said 6,800 cars a year. That's between new and used or is it 50? So roughly 7,000 cars a year between new and used. Exactly. It's pretty much half enough. Got it. And what were you saying? What's the revenue on that? 300 million is a revenue.
Got it. Okay. And so you have you have seven franchises. Got it. You know, the first thing that comes to mind is you have four Honda stores. How do you feel about I see you smiling already. How do you feel about? I don't know if it feels the right word. How did you react to Honda's announcement about cutting dealer profit margins by as much as like 40% just like give me your entire mental cycle from the moment you heard that story till now? When you hear 40%, you know, it can be big, but it's not 40%. You know, because it's only on the profit per car. And you know, we sell a lot of accessories and a lot of FMI products. It's not that much. And you know, when you hear that, I know it can be really frustrating. It can seems big. But when you hear why Honda's doing it and their plans for the futures, like now you start to understand why. And you know, right now in Canada, we are going to have a problem for all the manufacturers that don't have a certain amount of cars that are fully EVs by 2026. But Honda's been a little bit late to the party with the EV cars. So what this means? So, under decided to shrink down the volume a little bit for Canada for a couple of years to not have big, big penalties. But in order to do that and invest much more in the EV, they reduce a little bit our margins. You know, I'd rather not have to, but I think for the long game, it's better.
You seem pretty optimistic, which I'm surprised. You know, one could make the case that they shouldn't, like they can make these investments, but it can come into expensive. Their margin doesn't have to come into expensive. You're a margin. It could also, I could also make the claim that it actually diminishes brand value because the franchise is, you know, less profitable. Do you feel it's justified that, you know, they came out with this statement coming at the dealers margin. And I understand it's for a future investment. I get that. And I also don't have any horse in this race. I'm completely like down the middle. I'm a bystander here, but like, do you feel like it's justified that are coming after your pocket for this? If we only look at the short term, you know, it's, it's, it's not the best proposition that we could have yet. But, you know, I'm here for the long game. And, as always, been, you know, top manufacturers since the last 40, 50 years that they've been in Canada and America. So I think on the long game, it's, it's the play. They decided to make that play so they can maybe come back stronger in the next years. And they decided to build a $15 billion plant in Canada and that they're starting to build next year. So it's, they're going to give us a lot of cars to sell. A lot of nice EVs, a lot of hybrids. So like I said, it's two, three, maybe okay years on the 30 year careers. I don't think I will remember in 30 years.
I like the attitude. How is Honda doing in, in your markets in Canada right now? Does it generally speaking, how are sales inventory? For us inventories, it's been, it's been low right now. We have a personally 0.5 month of supply in my stores. I wish we had a little bit more. So like 15 days supply? Yeah. Wow. As we speak. Yeah. I got, I have a lot of cars coming in June though. So it's going to balance out a little bit. And sales are, you know, since we don't have a lot of inventory, we sell what we have. If we would have more cars, we would sell more, especially civics, base model civics, Alex, these are the cars that the Canada has always been really fan of. We don't have a lot of, yeah, forability. I see what you're doing. Fortability.
That's it. Are you experiencing similar challenges as the US? Like negative equity, affordability, crunch? Are you experiencing similar? Also like, is it, you know, are you experiencing more or less? Like how do you compare it? I think less on the on the side of affordability, you know, on the cars, I've always been more expensive than the competition in here in Canada. So we're still more expensive. I think the rest of the manufacturers are more and more expensive. So they're maybe joining on the little bit on this little bit more expensive than it used to be. But on the car, on the trade in, they worked so much that people are finishing their lease and they have five, six grand of positive equity. So most of the people, they take this amount of money and they put it on their next lease. So they can have lower payment.
So what are your biggest challenges right now? Like if you have the pinpoint top challenge or top two, what is it for you up in your market? I'm trying to figure out, I'm trying to actually compare. I'm curious to see like, you know, the similarities and differences, you know, cross border. On my side, the biggest opportunity and the biggest challenge I have right now is to find good use car. Mm hmm. Yeah. So we're, you know, maxed in our location of new car. We're always trying to buy a used car. I have a couple of buyers on the road. They're looking at the auction right now. And it's always important to have at least 1.5 months of inventory. That's our goal right now. We sit in a, we sit on 500 cars right now and we sell approximately 350 years a month. So I'm trying to get this number a little bit higher. So we can, we can sell more in the upcoming months because, you know, summer has always been a really good time for us.
And on the new car side, on the key, in the key of stores, the main, the main challenges I think EVs, because EVs are crazy right now in the province of Quebec. We have $12,000 cashbacks from government. So every person right now, what do you mean they're crazy? Like they're selling like crazy? Yeah. All the EV cars that are under 65,000 MSRP, you get $12,000 discount from government. Wow. That's more than the US. Well, Canadian dollar, Canadian dollar. Canadian dollar, exactly. So all the, you know, all the EVs that are in this price range, people are really want to buy them right now because the government said that next year they will reduce the incentive and the year after they're going to reduce it also. So it's a clock ticking. So people really want to buy their car before December 31. And you know, Kia, we have a couple of EVs. We have more incoming. So people are trying to put their in on the EV6, EV line, narrow EV the quickest they can.
Or EVs, your best sellers right now because of this, because of this tax subsidy? In the Kia side, definitely. We sell more than 50% of EVs right now, every month. That's like night and day with the US right now. Not to say that, you know, not to say that all EVs aren't selling. It's just that that's absolutely not the case on the US side. I mean, the sales are cooling quicker than your average vehicle. Yes. But don't get me wrong. All the cars that are too expensive to get the incentive from government, they're not selling. Yeah, I can imagine. Or the best salesman is the government. Yeah. How what a line. The best salesman is the government. I'm sure that the EVs above 65K are not selling. Like you said, but what about non EVs above 65K? Like how's that? And I do. I'm also cognizant that you you run pretty mainstream brands like Honda Kia, you're not a poor store. But how are the cars above those price points? And generally speaking, not just EVs. How are they doing for you?
In my side, I don't have a lot of cars over $65,000 since I sell Honda and Kia. But when I look at a dealership, there's a new city dealership not too far from here that I run by every day. And he has a lot of car in stock right now that I haven't seen that much cars in the main city stores for maybe two, three years now. So I know like I am dealerships are now having the best year. I think Porsche is different though, because someone who wants to buy 911 is going to buy 911. 100%. How much better are the margins when you send them from Canada to the US? How much more on average are you really making per car? It always depends on the exchange rate. I'm not a, there's way, way bigger exporter than I am. I do maybe 15, 20 cars a month when the exchange rate is good. So I'm usually trying to make between 1500 and 2500 per unit when I send them to the auction in the States. But like 1500 is what it left. I paid the transporter. I paid the man I'm fee. I paid everything. So roughly 50 and 2500.
And then what are you really banking on when you send the cars to the US? Are you banking on the exchange rate arbitrage or are you banking on that plus actually just making more money on the actual car? No, it's always the exchange rate. So you're saying there isn't a benefit. Like the market, the market speaks, it can be in the Canada US, it doesn't matter. There isn't actually a benefit to that specific car going to that market. It's more so the exchange rate. Exactly because I remember when I think it was in 2008, 2010, the rate was the same. One US dollars for one Canadian dollars and Canadian dealers, we were buying cars from the States. It was the opposite. Are you seeing any US entrance in your market? I know if there's a group of stores that, but a group of American dealerships that stores here, I don't think so. I know, you know, H. Greg is getting really, really big in the US. They're big in Canada too. I think about to Canada, they're starting to buy dealerships in the States. But I don't know if some of the major group are starting to buy dealerships in Canada.
This episode is brought to you by Experian Automotive. Experian Automotive is one of the most trusted sources of data and insights in the automobile industry and are a one-stop shop. That's because Experian maintains massive databases from credit profiles to vehicle history data and millions of consumer data points. Imagine the potential of Experian data insights to drive your marketing strategies. Dealers can use automotive, lifestyle and predictive data to find in-market car shoppers faster and at a lower cost. By leveraging targeted audiences, dealers can communicate with car shoppers based on make, model off-least, off-loan in equity, fuel type or vehicle servicing needs. All this allows dealers to communicate with the right car shopper with the right message at the right time. They can increase their success rates and consumers are happy because they receive timely, relevant communication. You can learn more about the Experian marketing engine by clicking the link in the show notes below.
Think about the presence in your markets of the online players. In the US, of course, there's the rise of Carvana. I competed in that space or various other players. I know Canada has its own set of players. Do they provide any meaningful competition in the market or is it sort of an afterthought, the online only players? How powerful are they in your market? They're not here. You're like, they're not. You looked at me like I fell off the moon. No, it's a, because I know Carvana is really big in the States, but here in Quebec, we have a lot that if, let's say you sell a product 100% online and you deliver it to someone's door, like it's door to door cells. And when you do door to door cells, you have a 30 day back that you have 30 days policy that you can return the product and get 100% refund. That's mandated by the government. Yeah, exactly. So people that don't, like so everyone was trying to sell car 100% online. Someone can buy the cars, drive it for 29 days. And after 29 days, just give the car back and they want my money back. So I know people are not entering to a 100% online because of that. It's probably going to change in the next years because online cells are coming. A lot of people are considering buying online, but most of the dealers, we don't have for the A to Z solution. We have customers, we have a lot of customers starting their process online, but they take the possession, they can pick up the car in the dealership. We do everything over the phone, but they come here to sign the papers and they leave the dealership with their new car. We don't deliver it in the cars. Oh, I can understand why.
So I want to transition, given this is a great tangent, I want to transition to just how do you run your stores? Like at a high level, are there any core differences? I mean, the 30 day return if you deliver it, that's a pretty core difference. Are there any other core differences in the way you operate your stores versus how a USD would operate? It's really, in 2009, I went to visit Paragonanda. I went with one of my GM. Oh, like a guy. Who's the biggest under dealer that we can go and visit? And so we drove from Montreal to Brooklyn. So I parked my car right in front of the store, getting the stores, say, I'm a hundred dealer in Montreal. I want to see how you guys are doing. It's reselling in a month what I do in a year. So the general sales manager is, hey, nice meeting you. You say, how you know us and how you come here? So I know I saw a documentary on Mr. Benstock and I'm like, I'm a hunter dealership and I want to do as good as you in my market. So he said, Oh, Mr. Benstock is here today. He's going to be happy to see you. So Mr. Benstock, he came to meet us. He spoke with us for maybe 15, 20 minutes. Explain how he's doing it in his market. And we spent half of the day with his general sales manager to visit all the departments of his store is a business development center. We went to his service center and you know, business is pretty much the same. The only difference is volume. So you're saying just the volume here in the US is just much greater. There's eight million people living in the province of Quebec. There's what 25 million in the New York City. I think there's 10, 10 hundred dealers in the area of New York City. There's 65 dealers in the province of Quebec. So you know, the biggest dealer here. 65 one dealers. No, what type of dealers? Under dealers. Whoa. Six in the private franchise dealers with three million. In the province of Quebec. Yeah. What's going on? Like, how does that get to? You know, one of my questions I was going to ask you is about open points. But why would, how did you get to, how did we get to 65 hundred dealers? What is hard to do? You know, they want to, and it's not only under. It's all the manufacturers. We all have the same amount of manufacturers that has on the between 60 and 70 for all manufacturers. I know more stores, they have more chances. They have of selling more cars. That's probably their philosophy. There's not been a lot of open points in the past years. I don't recall having, I've been seeing an open point for hando key dealers for the past. Maybe five, six years.
So we're pretty saturated in this market. That's an interesting philosophy. Because you'd think that fewer dealers could like consolidating, consolidating with fewer dealers, but the best dealers would actually provide the best possible experience for the customer. Not more dealers. I mean, I could see the other side as well, right? There's just more competition. So you have to be even better. But I feel like if I'm a manufacturer, I'd want my, you know, my brand in the hands of fewer better operators. So that actually, that surprises me to hear that. So I can only imagine how much that impedes your volume growth, at least on the new side, because you're just not as exclusive in your market. Exactly. But you know, manufacturers, they sell you two things. It's 10 cars. So having more open points, having more dealerships, I think you can maybe service more cars, service more cars, buy more parts from under. So I think they're winning on this side.
Are you facing any major headwinds in the Canadian auto market? I think we are in the worst, in the worst of what we could have been, because, you know, our interest rates are really, really high right now. We're talking, you know, lowering them in the next month. So I think the worst as, you know, we're maybe in the worst or it was maybe in the beginning of the year. I don't see how it's going to, it can be worse than what we do now. We see a lot of small dealers having trouble, people in the, not in the metro area, but in more a countryside. It's not as easy as it used to be, you know, and COVID years, they were not real years, you know, everyone was making so much money. You could sell cars, you know, blindfolded. So I think right now it's a big of a reality check.
When you say the small dealers are having trouble, why do you think they're having trouble? Let's say the dealer used to sell 200 cars a year, 300 new cars a year. You build a nice facility. So you pay a lot of money for your facility. You build a facility to be able to sell that much cars. You hire a lot of people to sell you these cars. And within a couple of years, your sales go from 300 to 150. So you still have the same overhead, but you have less car to sell. So you need to find a way to compensate for that. Use car buyers, you know, they're still there, but use car is really, really competitive for now margins or not as high as they used to. We margins are under three grand a car front and back for use car right now.
And what were they for you a year ago? Like, I don't want to go pee COVID when things were like five grand, six grand. But like last year, the same period, there were a thousand higher per car. And what's driving the decline in your market? Is it the car or is it, you know, the warrant to back end products? The main issue I see right now is last year, in the years before, there were not enough cars on the market. And now the market is being flooded by the manufacturers on the new car side. So people are lowering their price of the new cars to be able to sell them. It's the first time in years that we see dealerships announcing 25% discount on new cars. So if the new car price drop, the use car is going to drop. So and it's a circle that's always going and going and going. So now the prices of the use cars are going so low. People they want to get rid of their inventory because they're paying so much interest on their floor plan. So what they do, they prefer to sell the car the quickest possible and they keep the lowest margin and they try to make money on the back end.
How's it been for you managing? I mean, you mentioned you have 15 day supply. So I would have to think that you've done pretty well, but how's it been managing inventory for you? For new cars, we always try to sell what's coming in. That's our main target right now. And for the use car, we have approximately 50 day supplies. So for the use cars, what we try to do is get to market as soon as possible, price aggressively. Let's say you don't have any action on the car for the first 65, 75 days, we're just trying to get rid of the cars as soon as possible. Maybe through auction, maybe we send them to other dealers. We have the chance to be a group. So maybe sometimes a car doesn't sell here. I'm going to sell it, send it to one of my stores and maybe 30 minutes away from here and it's going to sell there. Yeah. I want to ask you a couple of into weeds questions, right? Like how do you operate your stores? Meaning do you have a managing partner at each store? Do you have like co-managing partners? Do you have GMs? How do you run your stores?
So right now we have seven stores. We have one GM that's a partner. He's been with us for 30 years, I think this year. So he's a managing, he owns a percentage of the store and he's the GM at this place. I'm the GM at one of the stores. So I operate as a GM and as the CEO of the group. My brother is a GM of one of the store too and he's the co-owner with the family also. And to all the other stores, I have a GM that's there too, that's running the stores. They could become a managing partner in the future. It's something that we often do. But we want to get the boys a couple of years behind the desk and if they continue to have their good years as they do it, we're not close to sell them shares of the business. It's something a lot of dealerships are doing this practice just to make sure your good guys stay with you for a long time. Yeah, retain that talent, definitely a good move. Just back to cultural differences or like regulations, what other nuances separate the Canadian market from the US market? I can't tell from the Canadian market, but let's say more for the Quebec market where my stores are located. We have a mandatory law that people need to have winter tires on their cars from December 1st to April 1st. So that's a really good thing for dealerships because your customers get to come back twice a year to do their tire change.
So what we try to do usually is we try to sell them the winter tires when we sell them the car and we try to attach them so we can give them free storage for the summer and winter tires so they need to come back to see you and install the tires. I think your customers coming back to your store twice a year, it's really nice. Like I said, it's another government help we have right now. That's a pretty pro business move, especially you said you store the tires for them. I don't want to take four dirty tires in my car to replace them. So you store them for me. I'm definitely going to be back.
Exactly. That's one of the strategies we have to have a good retention at the service department. We try to get on let's say on five years, we're looking at maybe 45% service retention after five years. So 45% of your service customers continue coming back to your store after five years? Yes, are we calculated as let's say you sell a thousand car a year, you're zero, you sell a thousand car. I'm many of these customers still coming back to your store five years later. So we're trying to go at 45%. But I'm saying that's what you're at, right? That is the number you're at? Does the number we're at and does the number or 20 groups are saying we should get right now we're at 47%. We're really happy with this number.
Yeah, I mean, what I'll tell you is that you have a ton of competition. So I've obviously heard of a lot higher in the US with some stores and there's also some stores that are worse and lower. But given your amount of competition and if your 20 group is putting out that bogey of 45%, it seems like you're doing something right. Yeah, exactly. So you're trying to, if you have your customers coming back to your store two times a year after two or three years, you're trying to sell them a new car, put them in a behind new wheels. So it's really helping us to have the retention even on the sell side.
What about other in-store processes? You mentioned you're struggling with acquiring used cars. Are you leveraging auctions primarily? Are you buying off the street, service drive? How are you doing with a used car acquisition in this market? We have a person looking at auction every day. So auction as you know, auction are not really the best car to buy, but it's the easiest way to buy some. So we're having people looking at them. We place a lot of bids to buy one or two cars every day because you know, people are putting their proxies so much higher these days. I have to imagine you're buying from Openlane. They made the acquisition of Manheim Canada. Yeah. So we go to Openlane. There's other auctions in the area here that we use. There's trade rev. I don't know if it's in the US too. Yeah, I'm from a trade rev.
So we try to be on every platform. We are also on Facebook marketplace. I have people looking at marketplace every day, refreshing their pages every five minutes to see if the new car is coming in. I think this is the best place that we can buy cars right now. It's brand new cars on the market. So I'm probably buying between 15 and 25 cars a month only for marketplace. Another 15 to 25 from the actions and maybe 50 from all sellers. We have a big network of people on the road buying cars from all the stores. And there's, you know, I'm buying a lot of used cars from Audi stores, not too far from where he's only keeping Audis and stuff. So we selling all these two. Yeah. Yeah.
So another question I had for you was you mentioned sending a bunch of cars to auction, right? What's your philosophy, right? Are these trade-ins? Why aren't you retelling them? Do you just not have the market for these types of cars to effectively retail them? Like how do you think about that? There's two types of cars that we're sending to auction. The first one is are all the cars that say that you wouldn't sell to your sister. If the car is not made for someone, I could refer this car to. For me, it's really easy to send it to the auction. I don't want any trouble with the customers coming back in two, three months saying, you sold me a lemon. And the other cars is high expensive cars. We were trying to sell maybe expensive cars one every two months, two, three months. But it's easier for us to just get back the money and buy civics, buy Kia for days with this amount of money. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't seem like that's really a market.
So tell me, what's on your mind was you think about the future of your group growth, the market, what gets you excited? For me, what's really getting me excited right now is interest rate coming down. I think we are going to have a good year next year if the interest rate are coming down. Economists says that the interest rate of Canada is probably going down to 1% lower from in the next five, six months. So right now we are at 5%. And the predictions are the rates going to be at 4% by the end of the year. So just for us, if 1% drop, it's going to be a lot easier for us to carry inventory. And I think customers are going to be really more inclined to change their cars because right now we're renewing customers that were paying 0%, 2% interest rate on lease. And right now we're renewing them at 7%, 8%. So if we can get a couple of percentage back, it's going to be easier a little bit for us to sell cars.
I'm really excited also to see what are the next models coming in the next years. Like I told you, Andes, as big plans for the next years, they're bringing 1 EV car year for the next five years. So for me, it's going to be really nice to see what's coming into the stores and what I can offer my customers. So I think it's what's going to be the plan for the next years. I think as a lot of new players are trying to get in the game right now. And I don't think it's going to be easy for them to stay in the new markets. I see, even fast, they open five stores and a couple of months here in the Montreal area. And then the Quebec area. And I don't see them selling a lot of cars. So I'm really curious what's going to happen with them. And there's a lot of manufacturers that plan to come here. We had the Lucid Motors and Imperial Motors that were planning to come to Canada. And I haven't seen the car from them yet.
Are you looking to make more acquisitions? Are you looking to grow with more stores? Like what's your thoughts? And also, and if that is the case, what type of brands are you looking at? Right now, it's not a plan. You know, I mean my brothers, we got we got in two years ago. So we bought back our own coal, who was in the business for a long, for a long time. So it was a big chunk at one time. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to integrate vertically a lot of businesses. So this is my goal for the next two, three years. I opened to last year, we opened the rust proof business. I just opened another one in April. So we're rust proofing cars. Wow. Another dealer, another dealer going into different or alternative businesses. I'm telling you, like every dealer I speak with nowadays is like more than I've more than ever, at least in my world, people are looking at alternative business.
And why are you? Why'd you get into rust proofing? Just in one store, we were selling 1000 rust proof protection every year that we were contracting to the guy just across the street. So one day I told my brother, because I wanted to open the parts stores. That was my first idea. I wanted to because we buy over, I think it's over two millions, non-hoey parts a year for our body shops. So I wanted to open just a parts store. So I was looking online to buy parts store seats. There's one for sale that there were franchise opening. And I found the franchise of rust proof. So I tell my brother, I say, you know what? We do so much rust proof every year. We should do them by ourselves. So I call the guy from the rust proof business. He sent me and my brothers to go visit one of his franchisees. And we had so much fun that day because we sell cars.
I never did a rust proof protection myself. So the guy said, he told me, I'll keep bringing your truck inside. I'm going to shoot your car. You're going to see we do the best rust proof protection. And we got into the rust proof business like this. Here we made only with this location, we did over a thousand rust proof. That's warranted for 10 years. So customers need to come back one of your. I was going to say, what's the economics on that? Like if you do a thousand rust proof, how much do you charge? What's your margins? So we charge $149 per car and $150 for trucks. It's not a big money, but it gets your customers to come back to your stores every year for 10 years. What's nice too is we put the rust proof business in one of the key store. So people are calling us away. Do you do a Mazda? Do you do pickup chumps? Do you do this brand? So we do it all brands for rust proof.
So what I prefer about this business, what I like the most is sometimes I go to the store and I see someone coming in the service drive with a 2024 Mazda 3 doing the rust proof business in the key store and he sits in the service lounge with all my customers and he's looking at the key of cars in the showrooms while he's doing that. So for me, that was the main goal. So I have a thousand customers that don't drive keyers that don't drive lallies that are coming to my stores to do the rust proof every year. That is very smart. So for us, that was the main goal with the rust proof and we did a thousand the first year. I think we're going to have a 80% renewal. So we're going to do 800 of these this year plus a thousand new. So in a couple of years, we're planning to do 5,000, 6,000 a year. I'm blown away. I mean, I've never done rust proofing. It's not something we do in this market. But the fact that you do it and you get people in your doors, I'd be curious to know how many, what percentage of those people you actually convert to other service work and a new car.
I don't have the numbers for conversion right now. It's not something that we track right now, but I want to track definitely. I know we did upsells for service department, that's for sure. Because the service advisor is going to see the cars, we change wipers. We offer is also washed at the same time because we do aesthetic too. So I know we can't rid of a little bit of customers, but in the long game, I really want to change a car for someone who's coming for rust proof for his car and he leaves with a brand new car. That's something I can imagine doing in the next year that we do. Speaking of ancillary products, your top products that you sell with cars, is it similar to US like a VSC, a vehicle service contract and gap insurance or anything different there? On the accessory side, it's winter tires. That's for sure. We sell 75% of our deals have winter tires in it. So two sets of tires in the car.
Does that get rolled into the loan or is that paid separately? How does that work? Yeah, it's all in the loan. And on the backhand, there's a product we sell here. It's like a little bit about gap insurance. So it's a similar product. We try to have 40% penetration and 40% penetration and extended warranty too. Okay. So it's pretty similar to US. I wanted to talk to you about something because I listened to the podcast, the recent one you posted. And you were saying that you cannot imagine not delivering a car the same day the customer purchased it here. It never happened the same day. It's always two or three days later. So it's always a two time visit for every time customer buy a car. Well, I'm not shocked anymore since I heard it happening in Massachusetts. But it seems like the more north you go, the slower people are to pick up their cars. But explaining why is that happening? Why do you guys sell the car and not deliver it for two or three days?
I think it's a culture thing because I'm coming back to my visit to Paragon Landa. He told me that his goal was to get a customer in and out with a new car in two hours. I was like two hours for me if I do it in two days. That's really, really good. They prep their cars right before the customer comes in. For us, the cars are not ready before the car comes in. So when we show a customer the car, the car is still wrapped with all the plastic. The car is not really PDI is almost never done before the customer buys it. So after we order the parts because we don't, maybe the difference we don't carry as much of parts as the bigger dealer in the US. So we order the parts the next day. We receive them the day after. We prepare the car two days after and the customer can pick it up to three days. So I think that's a culture thing. You said unwrap, but is that also for used? People buy a used car and pick it up three days later?
Yeah, all the time. Dude, you guys are unique, man. That's putting it nicely. I mean, people here are so impulsive. I buy that thing. I want it now. I mean, to wait three days, man, that's a new one for me. Yeah, and we probably have more cancellation though. We have approximately 20% cancellation. Oh, holy. That's a lot. Dude, that's a ton. Yeah, we have months with 40% cancellation though. That's incredibly, that's crazy. So there's a lot of buyers' remorse. A lot. You know, and you know, you get home, you talk to your neighbor, you talk to your uncle, and they told you they got the better deal at this store. They told you, oh my God. You shouldn't have. But this car, you should have. This is something I hear every day. So we have to stop a car two times. Wow. I can only imagine all the double work. Yeah, Southman, they merit, they, you know, they gain their commission. Sometimes you have to sell the car two or three times. So their commission is well-relevoceved.
All right, Jimmy, this was awesome. I think we covered lots of topics. Any parting thoughts before we wrap up? Honestly, it was really fun talking to you. Thanks a lot for having me. What's your favorite episode of the podcast, Ms. Kerris? Or do you have a favorite event? I should ask that. The first one I really liked was the one you did with Brett Morgan. Yep. That was a big one. Yeah, that was a big one. I really liked this episode. The one with Brian Benstuck was, you know, it was really, really, really good too. These were my two favorites. And the other one I really liked is what's the, I think it's Danielle Krennick's time autogroup. They got what the Tesla stocks. Yeah. Yeah. This guy is crazy. He's in a good way. Like he's a fan. It was a super, it was really nice episode. Guy started from nothing and built this out by himself. It was really good.
Yeah. I'll tell you a funny story. And Daniel, if you're listening to this, text me when you hear this. He texted me one day and we actually need to do this, but he's like, hey, he basically like made an ask of me. He asked me to kind of like join him on some meeting or something, but he was, what I like about Daniel is he's, he's a dealer, but he's, he's extremely transparent or at least that's the vibe I got. So he pretty much told me he's like, hey, would you like to attend this with me? And he was like very honest about why he wasn't like, hey, I come with me. It'll be cool. He was like, hey, like I need you for this. You know, this will be, this will help me out. And like I just, I appreciate, I appreciate candle like that. You know, in our business, you know, it's, you have the fortunate thing is you do have a lot of that people are real.
In other industries, in many cases, it's not like that. You know, a lot of people are very, you know, timid, like, oh, soft spoken or not, like, you know, they may be scared to say something to your face, but our industries, you know, has a very blunt nature to it, which is a great thing in my opinion. So anyways, that's my story for what it's worth. Jimmy, thanks for coming on.
This was great. I'll help the link to your group in the show notes below. And it was a pleasure. Really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming on. Thanks a lot for having me. Super happy to be the first candidate in the room. We finally did it. Cardio Shrimp guy news is live and ready to serve the car industry. We're not a traditional news outlet. And I'm not a journalist, but I believe the market deserves concise and unbiased car industry news presented in clear, straightforward English. From the latest stories in automotive to CDG podcast summaries, dealership best practices and even consumer deals, we're going to offer it all. And the best part in the classic CDG spirit, everything's 100% free for you. Check it out at CDG.News that CDG.News and please give us feedback. Tell us what else you want. Rip us apart. We're not scared. We just want to provide value. Again, visit CDG.News or click the link in the show notes below.
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. See you guys next time.