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Repair Work Boosts U.S. Car Dealer Revenue
New-car sales in the U.S. have slipped 3% so far this year. But dealership revenue is up more than 4%, thanks to an upswing in repair and parts replacement work.
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New-car sales in the U.S. have slipped 3% so far this year. But dealership revenue is up more than 4%, thanks to an upswing in repair and parts replacement work, the National Automobile Dealers Assn. says.
The reason, NADA Chief Economist Steve Szakaly tells Bloomberg News, is that America’s fleet is getting older in spite of the past six years of steady growth in new-car sales.
Szakaly notes that dealers beefed up their service work capacity nearly a decade ago to bolster revenue when the Great Recession cut new-car sales from 16.1 million units in 2007 to 10.4 million in 2009.
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