Saturday, December 16, 2017

The carpocolypse rages on.



I wasn't hunting ghost lots today. There are two lots I pass all the time and I haven't seen much progress one way or the other.  So, there really hasn't been much to blog about. Then today I was looking for something else and ran across this lot I got earlier in the year. This was the least concerning of all the lots. And it's still not that bad, but this lot was barely full the last time I saw it. This time it was completely full now and they were starting to double park cars.

Every single car in this lot that I could see was a 2018 model. Which I found odd. Why wouldn't they have those on the main lots?

4 comments:

  1. I went back to Nameless Suburban Shopping Mall a few days ago -- it's not actually near where I live, so this isn't something I do very often ...

    The dealers have learned some new tricks: the vehicles are now not as easy to notice because some of them are being parked near mall entrances in pseudo-random spots. Also, the stuff that gets stuck to the windows has been removed, but if you look closely, it's usually sitting on the passenger seat. Nearly identical temporary dealer tags are also a sure sign of what's going on.

    Nameless Suburban Shopping Mall has lost about a third of its anchors, and the anchor spaces haven't been redeveloped. That means there was an entire quadrant of the mall that usually had nobody parked anywhere near it. Most of the anchor spaces have been empty for at least ten years, and you can still see remnants of the former anchor space corporate logos stuck to the outside. (One of the spots was obviously a location for Parisian or Saks.)

    The area around Nameless Suburban Shopping Mall also has an old movie theater that hasn't been used for about fifteen years now, and that's where another change has happened.

    Now they're not even pretending that isn't an overstock lot. Some of the vehicles on it are still wrapped in protective paper coverings from the factory, while others look like they've had some sort of vented plastic bag condom pulled over them.

    But the surprise is that the overstock volume is nearly double what I saw just a few months ago. These dealers are really not selling the vehicles now.

    It's like car thieves would be doing these dealers a favor: the dealers would probably get the insurance claims paid at something resembling dealer cost if not retail value.

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  2. Oh wow. Huh. I thought the hurricanes would have sucked more of that up. Maybe they simply got rid of early year inventory.

    That's really interesting.

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  3. It all looked brand spankin' new, as in all 2018 models ...

    The paper coverings haven't even had much rain on them yet, and some of the vehicles still have some sort of pink or blue crap on the tires. My guess is that this is some sort of spray-on protectant the dealers can peel off or blast off with a power washer.

    Maybe the dealers were expecting people to come in to replace their damaged vehicles with new ones, but so far that's one thing that looks like it isn't happening.

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  4. Huh. That is interesting. Now I'm going to have to circle back around on my ghost lots and see what the model years are. They pulled demand forward for a really long time. So who knows how this is going to turn out. I mean..... the market only goes up. So.....

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