Wake up, Buy Here, Pay Here people. It's a beautiful day. Go grab yourself another cup of Joe and say hello to Jim and Michelle Rhodes on the Buy Here, Pay Here morning show. Take it away, you two. Time to do the show. Hey, everybody. It is time to do the show. We're sorry to be late. I know many of you are just camping because you're just thinking, do I have time to refill my coffee? Exactly. Or they're going to catch us on the ride home from camping. That could be true, yeah. That would be not a bad thing. I love camping. That'd be a pretty short week after Monday, Labor Day, and now we're gone. Yeah, that's a pretty short week. We do have some dealers out this week, anniversaries and this and that, so people are getting a little time away. A couple of updates. Shall we get to those? You got any news from around town? Sure. town crier no I am I the town crier I need a bell yeah oh yeah ding ding ding ding here you hear no nothing nothing okay a couple things I got uh we got on monday uh tim evans who's speaking at niada and um is the topic in at niada and with us on monday we'll be um hiring like lessons and hiring. Right. So that'll be good because, um, you know, a lot of dealers could use some help in that regard. Yeah. And Tim is a dealer. I'm not sure what state it's Evans auto sales. Okay. Uh-huh. And then, um, so then we've got, um, on Monday, the 10th, the week from Monday, we've got Gordy Tormolin. Yes. Outgoing president of the NIADA board and a dealer out of Illinois. And we should have Jeff Martin sometime before the conference. I haven't quite gotten that nailed down. And I'm in discussions now. Jeff Martin, who is the NIADA executive director, CEO. And then I'm also talking to Chris Tiller, who's a longtime director, VP. He's the guy at Carr Financial. So they've been around a long time. I've got a couple of things that we're talking about as potential topics. But look, you're going to want to watch and see when Chris Tiller comes because he has a wealth of knowledge and look forward to chatting with him. Nice guy. I really like him every time we've had him on because he's worked with us, podcasts, different kinds of podcasts. And I think that he came for one of our online events too. He tried to. Okay. Yeah. I remember that he was supposed to. He was a guest who couldn't make it. But yeah, he's been a part of our Tote the Note stuff. Yeah. And yeah, look forward. It's been a while. Look forward to catching up with Chris. It has been a while. It's been over a year. Yeah. It was before we moved back. Yeah. So again, we've got a couple of topics to chat with him about. So we'll see which one we settle on. But yeah, watch for that. We'll get that nailed down and let everybody know. But I think that's it. You know, we've got V8 deadlines coming up, but stuff only really. It's June 1st. Isn't it June 1st? Today is the 31st. Oh, 31st. Sorry. Tomorrow is June 1st. Right. It is just crazy how fast the days go by. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. We're going to be in Vegas again in no time, right? Just a couple of weeks. Just a few weeks. So for those who haven't made those arrangements, you're going to want to be there. We hope to see many of you there. I need to go back and verify the date. I think it's the last day, Thursday, that I am moderating a panel. We've got a few weeks to start hyping that up. Everybody who's listening, come to the panel. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we don't know yet if we're going to have permission to broadcast that one virtually. Yeah. But we'll just stay tuned. Well, we've asked. Right. And so it just kind of depends on AV and all sorts of stuff like that. Yep. Okay. Shall we get to our topic then? I think that's a great idea. So... the down payment conversation is an ever going conversation. It's been part of the discussion and by your payer since by your payer was a thing. Right. And in our VA groups throughout the month of May, where we're reviewing April data, you know, it just, it just continues to be the question. Obviously, you know, the thing that you hear me talk about plenty is that, Down payment for all intents and purposes is would seem that down payment is still the primary driver of volume. You know, we talk about kind of the steering wheel or a knob on a wheel to turn a big boat like it's it's. It's how you can move volume. You can always relax down payment requirements and increase volume. You can certainly stunt your volume by running the down payments up. So it is a regulator in a way. And as people talk about that in the context of business model, business strategy, it's just been so interesting to watch how people feel so differently. Just even the discussions inside a group of eight dealers on a screen virtually, it's like they just feel very differently about down payment. And it's all over the board. I mean, it's, you know, some places are, you don't find an awful lot of places anymore that are around that $500 down kind of thing, but there are still some out there. And, and, and so I think it's not really what you publicize. It's what you agree to with the customer. Right. And so there are a lot of factors here. And I think it's, it's one of those conversations that it's hard to talk about the numbers and without having people understand the whole scope of these operations. Because when I think about down payment, the numbers I brought today are going to be, I did an average down payment across all members. I did an average down payment as a percentage of the selling price of the car. And I did highs and lows too. So when you watch the highs and lows, you can see, man, they're just all over the place in terms of how they do business. Is one of them better than the other? tell that to the dealer who's who's you know who says that their numbers are different yeah it's like who gets to decide what's right for you or what's right for me yeah and it depends on your business model and we've seen some dealers very successful having higher acv higher down payment and we've seen other dealers very successful lower acv lower payment So I'm with the higher ACV and a lower payment. Yeah. Yeah. Like it really is all over the place. Yeah. So, and I think we had a really one particular conversation where a dealer, you know, was kind of adamant that they, you know, we're going to hold out for more down payment. They kind of had to, to make their business model work. And so the question came up, you know, do, do you think down payment is a predictor of success? Sort of, you know, like ask one dealer, well, how do you feel after 12 years? This was a 12 year dealer. I remember. And after 12 years of doing this, do you feel like that you need more down payment for success on the loan? And they were like, absolutely not. Like we have the same amount of success with the low down payment customers we do with a higher down payment customer. So it really sparked a lot of, interesting thoughts besides what was actually said, people started thinking, well, you know, should I revisit this? Because anytime we talk about down payment, it's important to remember that there are two different kinds of things to think about here. One is the success of the loan. Will a customer who gives more down payment be more successful on their loan? So that's, there's a lot of really, really across the board opinions about that too. And are you, you want to list these and then I can add my comment to that. Sure. Yeah. And then the other one, And I just am always mindful. You can talk about this stuff philosophically and decide whether... if I got more down payments with my loans perform better philosophically, you can discuss that and decide what makes more sense strategy wise. But from a pure mathematics standpoint, like from a cash management standpoint, some dealers need to get a certain amount of down payment in order to make the math work. And cause they can't, like I said in one of our meetings last night, you can't make the exception day after day without emptying your bank accounts. So, you know, people have to kind of strike that balance and everybody's in a different capital position. Yeah. And, you know, you hear like our friends at NEO, one of the things that they've been tracking and what they lean very heavily on is that down payments are not an indicator of loan success. And, you know, and from my perspective, I have not been a dealer. I've talked to a lot. You have been a dealer. that it seems that it's more about, and Tommy Brandes would be like, yes, it's more about your collection practices. And it's also about how much do you need to keep your machine moving forward? Yeah. And I couldn't help but think, and by the way, you mentioned the underwriting that suggests that down payments are not the predictor. So we've been doing, with our clients, we've been going inside their history, the ones that have years worth of data history, multiple pools of closed loans. And I can tell you with one of the ones we did recently, larger down payments were absolutely an indicator of more success. Not by big margins, like, you know, we bucketed different percentages of selling price and it just showed that That definitely more down payment translated into more success. You know what I love? Well, besides you. I love that as we really start to look at data, we're getting our own data points and things like that. And as we're really looking at data, there's certain questions that we're asking. And it's just, it's interesting to me that, you know, we, we, we're collecting enough data that we can based on this, this is what we're seeing. And, and that, you know, there's so much out there that says, no, this works, no, this works, no, this works, no, this works. And, you know, we've had the conversation about other topics that sometimes that's just like your gut or, you know, this is how I feel like it, it works best. And it's, I love getting more and more actual data that shows how does this perform? And, and, but it is, it is still going to be like, based on this business model, this works. It works. Yeah. They have high success, but it's just interesting as we can collect more and more data is we can take a look and see, is that the same with other business models too? Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, it is nice to be having the data come in. I think having larger pools of data to be able to refer, that is fresh data. Like today we're talking about April data just because we have not yet closed May. And so we don't yet have the May numbers in, but that's still pretty fresh. I mean, we're looking at, you know, last month's numbers, you know, post tax refund season, by all accounts, April would be getting past it. And so it's, you're going to hear some numbers today that are, I think the other thing that's tricky, like for me, you know, I like to be super transparent about the data that we share. However, we have a privacy, you know, thing with our clients or with the V8 members rather. And so we can't, we can't share who's who here. I'm just going to give some numbers in a, in a kind of an aggregated, some average numbers and then some highs and lows, as I said. So you want to share the screen and we can show the numbers that, let me get this kind of ready. It is right there. So let's first look at, again, I'll just remind, this data is coming only from our V8 dealer groups. And it's all groups brought together in this particular data pool. And then the average down payment at delivery in the month of April came out to $1,715. And is this based on how many dealers? um about 30 I think about the number and then um so you've got um you know it's it's a better it's better information than asking a couple guys at the car auction you know what I mean it's still a small pool relative to the larger industry yeah but it's better than you know you've got some dealers out there who are just not they don't have good sources of comparative data if they're not in a 20 group and so it's um it's just an example of um you know kind of what you know what can matter there but now let's look at down payment as a this is by the way all these numbers that we're talking about are just down payment at delivery we don't factor in any deferred down payments we just treat those like what they come to the dealership with right at the time of delivery so down payment as a percentage of selling price The low in the group was seven and a half. And then the, the average came in at 12.6 across our dealer groups, which that's, that's pretty consistent. You know, I'm, I'm always telling dealers, you know, we want to try to ask for 15%. You know, people can ask for more than that. So why don't we pause here a minute and talk about for, for example, how would you arrive at how much to ask for? Well, We've done podcasts in the past about down payment and techniques for asking for down payment. And I think the first thing I would say is that I would ask for plenty. The question is when you start the conversation about down payment. If I start chatting with somebody online who's asking me about a down payment and I ask them for 20% down, they'll probably never come to the building. So, you know, it's like that's the tricky part is how do you have those conversations through social media, through chat threads? And haven't we seen that, you know, most people when they're having a conversation via social media or the phone are going to say less. Most people do. They say less than what they actually have. Yeah. Um, because it, you know, it's a negotiating thing and, and, and they're going to try to save as much as they can and keep it in their pocket and have to spend on it. So, you know, I, I hear from, um, different people that we work with that do BDC and, and all of that, that, um, that you know they they may say yeah it was approved at 500 down and when they get there um it's it's up to the sales people to see all right you know what what really is what we can get for a down payment yeah and as we talk about that I'm reminded that You know, this is and we're in an age where technology is shifting, right? We're getting more and more technology and artificial intelligence and the ability to chat with people in chat box. But I'm reminded here that this is where I think the human element is still going to be relevant. And I think this is where we got to kind of keep having these conversations, because if you're a customer who's hoping to buy a car with 500 down. And I want to ask you for more down payment than that. I think that conversation is so much better done in person, face to face, look you in the eye. If you, if you're the customer and you come to us, Michelle, and you say, I'm hoping to buy a car today with 500 down, then I said, well, let's see what we can do. And let's then let's go to the desk and we'll work up all the stuff. And you may or may not have an application in yet, but I certainly want you to drive the car and really like it. And now you, when we sit together and I look you in the eye and say michelle I know you were counting on buying a car with 500 down today and I just we may be able to get that done let me ask you though we typically would like to see customers do around 20 down and that car that you've chosen is this so that 20 would be this number are you in a position to do that because obviously you know if you can do more down payment it's going to help you one with approval it's going to definitely increase the chance of me and being able to send you home in the car today It's going to potentially lower the payments for you. Certainly going to save you some interest if you can do some more down payment. So obviously I'm looking you in the eye. I'm not flinching one bit. I'm saying this is why more down payment is in your best interest, Mr. or Mrs. Customer. How do you feel about, you know, because this is something that I've, when I hear, you know, $500 is not going to do the thing. What if a dealer has one or two cars on his lot that that would work with? I mean, so something that's a lot less expensive. So if someone comes in at $500, it's like, we can absolutely get you in these two or whatever. If you want to look at some of the others, we will have to talk about down payment. It's... I think... you can absolutely do that. I think what the difference is really technique is like for me, I would, it's always my approach to try to help the customer buy the car that they want to buy. Now, we also know that if we allow them to customers with low down payment, we'll come in and choose the most expensive car on the lot. And that's difficult then for us to work with. So what you're touching on is some of the stuff that we really should probably make this a topic going forward, because the idea that a down payment is, is one of the things to negotiate with a customer and how to, how to help them land on a car. and help them choose a car that works well for them. You know, we hear dealers that say, you know, in your credit situation, because most dealers we're finding prefer to do an app first and then help the customer choose a car. And it just is... is not an environment that I would want to work in where I said, we've looked at your credit and you're approved for one of these two cars. This is it. This is what you get. Because I like my chances better as a salesperson of working with the customer and say, I know you really like that blue whatever. you know, can we, can we work on down payments? Is there somebody that might be able to help you with some more down payment? Have you got, you know, a family member who might be able to help? Have you got somebody that owes you money? You know, this and that is like, we got something we can sell on, you know. Yeah. I mean, we've, we've even offered the, the tactic of, do you have a car that you could trade in? Even if it's, you know, if, is it sitting in your driveway, needs a tow truck? Okay, we can do that. And, and, or whatever it is, but just asking for, some way of being able to increase that in a way that, you know, it might be a solve, solve a problem. Like the car is sitting in aunt Joni's driveway has been for a year. Like we can get rid of that for you. And that's, you know, give you an extra $300 or whatever for the car. Yeah. And I think, you know, obviously with our V8 groups, that thing just started in January. So we've got data. We did some beta stuff back in the close of last year. So with those particular dealers, we're barely getting five months worth of data. You know, most of them are more like three or four. But there are a few that we've got years. Yeah, yeah, with our clients, not the V8 dealers. So I think that when I look at these numbers, because I would ask dealers, again, if you're listening from your car or whatever, then know that the numbers, again, the low is 7.5%. The average was 12.6%, and the high was 18.7%. So when you look at that 7.5% to 18.7%. So most people aren't even doing 20% when you say, we need to do 20%. As a percentage of the price. Most people are not asking for that because that's the high. And they sure won't get 18.7% unless they ask for it. So this is where it really boils down to. This is where you start getting into technique and training. Yeah. Okay, so this is why when I look at these kind of numbers, I think, people would say, well, what's the real difference? Well, some of it's business strategy, underwriting and business strategy. Some of it's capitalization. Obviously, some dealers just can't afford to do. The math just doesn't work for them. The deal structure's got to fit a certain thing with their lender or whatever. Then that can kind of paint you into a box. But I would say in almost any scenario, training... We should work on training to help us get more commitment from the customer. Almost any dealer you ask would say there's almost always money on the table. We just got to learn to ask for it better. And I think the techniques that I'm really talking about is I would not be afraid to ask for down payment. I would ask for 50% down payment. Why? Because it's good for the customer. I'm not trying to scare them. I'm not asking them to do anything that wouldn't be to their benefit. it is and you don't want to paint them in a corner so like it's you're asking for more down payment rent is due in two days and you know it's like having because we really are in this industry also um financial advisors in a way where it's like okay how much you're paying for rent and that we're walking them through Like, this is what we see a budget should look like, and this is the kind of payment that looks like you would be able to comfortably pay. Yeah, and I think, and we do have one more batch of numbers here to share, but before we get to that, I want to talk about this idea that You know, when we talk about dealers who are, their volume is off because we're hearing a lot of dealers and you've seen on social media, people are saying, man, our month of May has been really slow or it's been feast or famine. I see that. And then I see other people time it in. It's like, it's like it is every May or it's like it, you know, it's like we're doing fine. So I don't, I, yeah. Well, again, that's why you got to go get the numbers and you got to look at the numbers and see what people did. So you can say, well, man, I just barely got $600 average down payment in May. Well, other dealers, dozens of dealers across lots of States. This represents many States from April. Yeah. They got $1,715. So it's like, it's just a point of reference. This is all I'm trying to share here today. It's helpful for, especially for some of the newer dealers. It's like, okay, out there, the average of 30 plus dealers all across the U S is X. Right. Right. So I think this is why we want to see that we've got, We've got the we want to talk about specific numbers and then we have to recognize in there when volume is off. My question to the dealers would be, well, can you afford to relax your down payments a little bit? Can you afford to be more flexible with down payments? Because that typically would allow you to approve more customers. Right. And so there's I'm always super watchful of that. But I think. The thing to really connect here going forward as we accumulate more and more data, we're able to talk more intelligently, very specifically about success. It's like, but does that dealer who gets 18.7%, for example, do their loans perform better? True. Right. This is the part that we really need to know is like today at the time of delivery, it's a cash management question. Yeah. Over time, we need to know, is that really producing more for them? Is that dealer how much better? It would be interesting to know how much better is that portfolio performing versus the dealer that got 7.5%. And the wild card is your collection practices, obviously. And your underwriting. And your loan closing. Yeah, yeah. And I think that it's worth pointing out with this, of the dealers that we're drawing these numbers from, they are from brand new to very seasoned, large portfolios. And when Jim and I were looking at some of these numbers, because he gets all excited and wants to share, and I'm like, that really is pretty cool. Down payments... All across the board, even the seasoned dealers have that kind of spread. Yeah. And then the younger ones have that kind of spread. So down payments, it's like even when you look at those that have a huge portfolio, they're still right around that 12%. yeah that's yeah yeah our portfolios or our pool of dealers right now ranges like you said from brand new up to I think the largest dealers portfolio is around 25 million so you know it's like that's roughly the range of people we're talking about here but um you're right I mean those things vary and we had a dealer on our podcast a while back that we weren't talking about down payment but they they related something. Cause I asked the question on my memory of your business is that you, you really, he was the dealer that I credited with saying, you kind of, you, you shared with me sometime that you sort of look past the down payment and he didn't remember. I had to kind of refresh his memory about the conversation. And he said, yeah, we, we actually don't get a down payment. And so and here's a guy with multiple locations, mega million dollar portfolio. Now, they don't collect any down payment. They don't ask for any down payment for a down payment. I mean, I don't know if he means that they only cover taxes or whatever. I don't. But the point is, he gets almost no down payment. They do lots of business and he's been in business for decades. So there's something to think about here. Like, I think it's easy to say that I'll agree to less down payment when I'm a very healthy business and I've got plenty of positive cash flow and I can afford financially to take that risk. I can afford to do less down payment. Because most of your younger dealers, I mean... as you're building up a portfolio, it's, you can sell out your lot and not have money to be able to buy another car pretty quickly. So that's part of what the down payment does is to be able to give you the money to buy another car. That's what I say. It's kind of two different conversations. One of them is cash management. One is likelihood of loan success, like in the deal structure and the likelihood of loan success. And I think there are different conversations in some dealers and, You know, it's one of the things you see in our groups is that that that strategy varies based on those factors, you know, primarily. And so this is all just part of the thing is like we want to just study the numbers and be able to say, look, here's what dealers are getting. And then, like I say, as we move forward, we'll be able to have dealers in the same group say, how come you get, you know, 17 percent and you only get five percent, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's really, you know, we love being able to bring this kind of information to the morning show. And part of the beauty of one of the V8 groups is that it's this compare and connect that you've got dealers that are talking about the stuff. And it's like it's off of real data. This is this is these are the real things. And it's just funny. You know, I I knew or to buy here, pay here. And it's when you get a group of dealers together. everyone feels like their model is right and correct and everyone should be doing X. And it's just an interesting conversation to, to watch that. And so in the V8, it's like, these are the numbers and this is how your, how your portfolio is performing. And this is, and, and so it just kind of, it's, it, it, it becomes less of, of, of, it it it becomes more leaning into data instead of well it's always worked for me yeah and so it's going to work for everybody else kind of thing yeah and it's a lot less guesswork like one of the things we and one of the things we're doing in v8 is the data that we're talking about here is validated what I mean by that is the dealers are either giving us access to their dms so we can get in and spot check and verify yes the numbers of the reporting if they look out of whack or whatever we're able to get in and check those Or they send us the source reports that they use to prepare the numbers. So it's a way for us to have some sort of method of verification. You know, it'd be some time before the DMS providers would create these reports for us if they ever did. And so it's like, how do we... How do we make sure that the information that we're getting is sourced directly and not just the dealer making up numbers to making themselves feel better? Well, and that's been, I would say probably about 30% of our dealers in V8 are in a 20 group as well. And we had the question when we said we want you to verify. It's like, why? We've never had to do that before. And it's like, because it's just a little bit different. We're doing this a little bit different than V8. So there was I had to be that explanation about this is why. And it's funny because when I when I talk to dealers that I've met and know and I've gotten to know a little bit and they talk sometimes about, well, sometimes the data is like. bit fluffy it's it's been inflated or it's been deflated or somehow um in a 20 group yeah and if they know because they don't know yeah you know but yeah they're guessing I mean I think it's um Look, the 20 groups are going to do things the way they do things. You know, there's methodologies. Yes. But I think what I'm really trying to say over here is that we're trying to make sure the numbers that we have are clean. Are they perfect? No, we're working on it. We've got dealers still struggling to figure out how to do this stuff. I've loved watching you as new people come in and they're struggling to get their numbers in. And the numbers, it's a pretty like 30 data points, something around there. Um, but being able to get the clean number, um, is something that I just have really appreciated watching you say, Hey, let's just jump on a call and we'll walk you through and show you how to do the thing. And, you know, so that, so that we're making sure that we're getting really clean because, because when Jim goes through and looks at all the data and, and is, is going through and checking stuff, it's frequently, especially with the newer dealers, it's that there's something really off or that you have to go in and it's like, all right, so that's not the right place for pulling or whatever. Data entry, they're putting the number in the wrong box or whatever, so that stuff can happen. So, you know, it's just a way for us to spot check and verify. We've moved to a form where the numbers are month over month so that the dealer themselves can see if this number is dramatically different than what their numbers normally look like. They can see it right there in the form. But Yeah, I think we're trying to make ourselves available to help the dealers walk through this. And, you know, we've got dealers that are very inexperienced. They don't know what you mean by certain terminology. They have to have, you know, a little handholding on some of that stuff. And that's OK. We want to help them learn and make sure that their numbers are comparable to the others. And look, different softwares, different business practices, different, you know, whatever strategies. So these numbers are still. It's always a challenge to try to bring people with different business models, different softwares and all on the same apples to apples. It is. It's definitely one of the things that is, um, you know, one of my chief roles and the reason I'm going to stay so involved throughout 2024 and directly, you know, moderating these and touching the numbers and making sure, because we've just got to make sure we get the process down. And, and I've persisted with our dealers to say, yeah, I know, uh, No data with verification, no meeting access. I got to do that because I'm really committed to preserving the integrity of what we're doing there. When we come and talk about numbers, I don't want to add to any confusion or misinformation for dealers out there. One of the things we're doing for the podcast, the reason we show up free three times a week is because we want to get good information to dealers so that they can make better decisions about their business. So we're just we're just making it available. Right. And so this is in pieces. I mean, at least a little, you know, bits they can get it. So this last number is something that dealers actually asked for in one of our meetings. It's not a number that I'm used to looking at is down payment as a percentage of cost. So they're just you know, you think about we most of us track a cash and deal number. So for those not familiar, cash and deal in the simplest form would be. You know, if you have an $8,000 unit cost and you get $2,000 down, rough numbers, then you're at $6,000 cash and deal. Well, what this does is it measures the down payment as a percentage of cost instead of looking at it as a cash and deal number. And so those numbers were... So cost, talk about cost. Inventory cost is going to be we don't we don't include pack in the number. So you've just got the purchase price of the car plus reconditioning. That's it. We don't put any of the aftermarket add ons like if you got a warranty in there, any of that kind of stuff. We don't put those numbers in there. So this is just going to be the inventory cost of the vehicle. with reconditioning so that's why I say just cost with recon so basically purchase price plus so so this number because you know you have the one that's down at delivery percentage of selling price this one is this to me and tell me if I'm wrong this shows how well they're buying cars too this number about the inventory cost because if they're if they're covering you know at the high end 31 percent with the down payment then you know they've they've with they've got they've kept their their inventory recon in certain bounds and or boundaries and and they've got a lot of like they're buying in the recon dial that's what that says to me that could probably be true I mean I think that's generally would could be a conclusion I think The reality is some dealers are just going to be better getting down payment. I mean, they may have, you know, if you look at the average and the high, the difference in the 21% and the 31% could just be maybe they both have the same amount of cost, but they're better at asking for down payment. Yeah, it would be interesting to see those that are in the high on one. Are they on the high on the other? too because it could be just completely um and that's kind of the stuff that you guys talk about too exactly yeah like so just because those dealers have a higher cost their markups could be different we've been talking about gross profit and how much is the right number and term of loan and all this stuff comes into play so that's what I say this is just one piece of data but if we just keep it on down payment for right now and just think you know if we just start trying to figure out what what are dealers doing in terms of down payment and how do they What can they know that can help them? For today, what you can know is that our groups averaged $1,700 down in the month of April. And that was about 20%. That was about 20% of the cost of the vehicle across all dealers. Again, costs could vary, down payments could vary. So these are just averages. Mm-hmm. you know, we don't, we don't do benchmarks with V8. We're just focusing on averages. And so this is a, you know, kind of why I focus on that for, for today, especially people trying to listen to the car. It's like, you know, just trying to understand what's, what's typical. So, you know, that kind of wraps up what I had in my share for. I wanted to shout out. I posted it before. Gene, I hope you got your power and internet back. He must have. Yeah. Right. He was able to. Yeah. He must have. Oh, you know, I don't, the morning show, you'd like to think that we break the internet, but. But we've never broken power. We've never broken power. Yeah. Or the internet. Yeah. Or the internet. Yeah. So anything else? No, I don't think so. Moral of the story? The moral of the story is we're about to close the month of May. Yeah. And I think as people, you know, I've traditionally... We'll talk about this again in May when we get the numbers in. Yeah, we can look and see how those numbers compare month over month. But I think one of the things I've traditionally shared, this is very general, but... You know, you have your peaks and valleys in buyer-payer. Generally speaking, I would say November and December are traditionally slower, not for everybody, but across the industry, probably slower. And then January is a little bit unpredictable now with tax refunds kind of shifting the way they are. But then, you know, February and March are typically the peak of your tax refund season. That means April through October is generally pretty consistent. You know, it's pretty much in no season there. Right. And so I think dealers can expect we can learn a lot through the stretch of, you know, April through October. We just got to watch the numbers and see what we're learning. i love it hey everybody thank you so much for joining us today happy friday we've got a short weekend we don't have one of these long holiday weekends it's a regular weekend go camping go spend some time outside because the weather everywhere is just improving and we just I think I will see you okay thank you so much for joining we really do appreciate your support and if you guys have a topic you want to hear feel free to reach out thanks again everybody have a great day
