If you’ve made the decision to start your own car dealership, chances are that you already have a good amount of experience in this field. Most new owners do. Often, they worked their way up to managing a sales department at another dealership before finally taking the leap.
However, while understanding a lot about cars and how to sell them is important, you’ll also need to offer financing to start a car dealership.
3 Reasons You Need Financing to Start a Car Dealership
Before you break ground or buy a dealership, it’s essential that you have plans for an F&I department. Here are the three main reasons you must have financing to start a car dealership.
1. Every Car Dealership Offers Financing
While there are certainly exceptions, customers have simply come to expect that dealerships will offer them in-house financing. If yours doesn’t offer this popular service, you might lose potential customers before they ever walk in the door. Others may be tougher to sell simply because they’re suspect of the new dealership that doesn’t offer this “requirement.”
2. Financing Leads to Greater Customer Satisfaction
When you begin a new dealership, it’s of the utmost importance that you’re able to benefit from positive word-of-mouth as soon as possible. You probably don’t have the biggest marketing budget, so you’re depending on satisfied customers to spread the word about how much they enjoyed their experience.
While there are a number of ways you can improve customer satisfaction at your dealership, one is actually to offer in-house financing. For the most part, the more options you’re able to offer, the better. No customer wants to feel as though they had no choice when choosing how they’d finance such a large purchase.
3. Offering Customers Financing Leads to Greater Sales
Finally, offering financing can actually increase sales. One simple reason is that doing so keeps the customer’s path to making a purchase uninterrupted. You don’t have to send them elsewhere to acquire financing and hope that they don’t end up at another dealership instead.
Furthermore, if you offer a large menu of F&I products, it’s much easier to sell used vehicles. A car may have 80,000 miles on it, but if your dealership can provide potential customers with a service contract, it will be easy to look past that and make the purchase.
Where to Begin with Financing to Start a Car Dealership
Despite how important it is to secure financing before you start a car dealership, the good news is that it’s never been easier to do so. At Vantage Finance, we make sure that used car dealers are able to offer in-house financing to their buyers, so they enjoy all of the benefits listed above.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help.