When people talk about the Internet these days, they say things like, “It’s leveling the playing field.” And just last month I talked about how a dealer used the Internet to verify a customer’s Social Security Number. What’s amazing to me is that not everyone was so hip to the Internet earlier this decade.
A post made on Oct. 2 on the magazine’s F&I Forum made me think, “What a great story of a dealer doing it right.” But that was before I talked to Mark O’Neil, CEO of DealerTrack, about something he discussed during his keynote address at the magazine’s September F&I Conference and Expo.
With the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) Convention only three days away (at press time), it has been a bit of a scramble to get the March issue out the door. Happily, I can say we have one heck of an issue this month, with technology taking center stage.
Did you hear the news coming out of Edmunds.com just before the holidays? Leasing increases 21 percent in 2006. It seems as though DealerTrack’s Raj Sundaram’s prediction of its revival back in November is on par so far.
Talk about birth by fire. Four days, two shows, about 500 photos and two notebooks crammed with notes. And out of the notes I took during the third-annual F&I Conference and Expo in Las Vegas, the one comment that stood out was the one made by this one brave soul who grabbed the microphone at the conclusion of a panel discussion on compliance and uttered, “I’m afraid to go back to my dealership.”
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