How Long Should a Car Stand Before You Cut the Price

There is no industry answer to this, and any number you find online will not fit you. Days to sell depend on segment, region, season and your cash position.

But your own normal already exists, it is just not written down anywhere. Here is how to get at it and what to do with it.

Step 1. Work out your own normal

Take the last twenty cars you sold. Two dates for each: when it went on sale and when it sold.

Calculate the median, not the average: line the durations up from shortest to longest and take the middle one. One car that stood for six months will ruin an average; the median shows the typical picture.

That is your normal. Yours, not someone else's.

Now split those same twenty by price, by make, by body type. You will probably find the normal differs. Budget stock turns over differently from premium, and commercial differently from passenger.

Step 2. Set two markers

Once the normal is known, two marks go on it.

First: normal plus half. If the median is 30 days, the first marker sits at 45. This is the point where you do not cut the price, you check the listing. Photos, title, description, number of marketplaces, publication date.

Nine times out of ten the reason sits there, not in the price. What exactly to check is set out in aged inventory with no calls.

Second: double the normal. If the median is 30, the second marker sits at 60. A discount is justified here, because you have already checked everything else.

The difference between the two markers matters. Up to the first you change the presentation for free. After the second you pay in money.

Step 3. Work out what waiting costs

A discount feels like a loss and waiting feels free. It is the other way round.

Standing costs you three things at once:

Frozen cash. The money in that car is not working. Over your average days to sell it could have produced another margin.

The space. Rent divided by number of spaces, multiplied by the extra days.

The discount you will give anyway. The longer it stands, the bigger it has to be. By waiting you are not avoiding the discount, you are increasing it and paying for the standing time on top.

Work it out for yourself: take your usual margin, divide by your median days to sell. That is what one day of standing costs in profit not made. Multiply by the days over your normal.

It often turns out that a discount in the second week past normal is cheaper than a month of holding out for the full price. What you really earn on one car goes through where the margin goes in more detail.

Step 4. Cut once, and meaningfully

When the decision is made, how you do it matters.

A token hundred changes nothing: the listing stays on the same page of search results where nobody sees it. You spent money and got nothing, and in two weeks you will be cutting again.

The working logic is different: look at what the first five comparable cars cost in search results, and cut enough to land among them. The buyer compares you not with the whole market but with what fits on the first screen.

What to do with cars past both markers

Sometimes a car passes 45 days and 60, the listing has been checked, the discount given, and still nothing. Three options work here, and all three are legitimate.

Sell it on to another dealer. You lose margin but free up cash and space. Run the formula above and a trade sale in month three is often better than a retail sale in month five.

Try another market. A specification that does not move in your region may be ordinary elsewhere. It does not always work, but checking is free: look at how many such cars are listed nearby and at what prices.

Accept the buying mistake and stop repeating it. The cheapest of the three over time. One car that stood five months costs less than a habit of buying cars like it every month.

What not to do: hold it unchanged and wait for the right buyer. They may come, but while you wait the same money could have turned over twice.

What this normal will not show you

Season. Some months are simply quieter than others in every market. A median calculated in autumn will look breached in January although nothing broke. Compare like periods rather than consecutive ones.

Buying. If one specification regularly passes both markers, the problem is neither the listing nor the asking price. The problem is that you keep buying it. That is a purchasing decision and discounts do not fix it.

What this requires you to have

All of this arithmetic rests on one thing: being able to see how many days each car has been listed.

If the listing date and sale date live in a spreadsheet filled in by hand and irregularly, calculating the median is already awkward and tracking the markers in real time is impossible. In practice that means you find out about aged stock when the car is in its third month.

In Dilizy it sits in the vehicle record: days listed, which marketplaces it is published on, how many enquiries came in. The moment a car crosses your marker is visible straight away rather than after the fact.

15 days free on your own stock. A card is added at signup and nothing is charged during the trial. We set it up and migrate your data together with you.