Used-car sales likely above 3.2M for July

Look for used-vehicle sales this month to be north of 3.2 million units, say industry analysts. TrueCar and Edmunds.com each released separate analyses this week forecasting July used-car sales in that ballpark.

Edmunds is predicting 3.22 million used sales this month, which would result in a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 36.9 million.

Meanwhile, TrueCar predicts the monthly sum may go above 3.24 million.

These forecasts include used-car numbers from private-party sales as well as those from franchised and independent dealerships.

Drilling down into some earlier numbers, Cox Automotive chief economist Tom Webb blogged Wednesday about a specific set of dealers — those at the seven publicly traded groups — and the run of success they have had over the past six years.

With many of the public retailers reporting second-quarter results last week, Webb found that this group (Asbury Automotive Group, AutoNation, Carmax, Group 1 Automotive, Lithia Motors, Penske Automotive Group and Sonic Automotive) has now gone 24 straight quarters with increases in same-store retail used unit sales.

“On a sales-weighted basis the gain was 6.9 percent — the best since fourth quarter of 2013,” Webb wrote.

However, perhaps tempering some of that excitement was this: the period marked a new low for average gross margins, Webb said. He also pointed out that there was no real year-over-year change in average used retail selling prices (both of these metrics were also on a sales-weighted basis).