With the acquisition, CarGurus will expand its customer base to deliver high-quality leads and return on investment to dealerships, Trevisan said. Autolist also brings technology that will allow the two brands to add lenders for financing preapprovals, as well as to expand into digital retailing down the road, he said.
Trevisan told Automotive News the two companies are culturally similar and share similar values around technology and providing a consumer-focused car-buying search.
“They are what we think is among the industry’s best mobile app experience, which we can learn from, to be honest,” Trevisan said. “They’ve also made a lot of progress in innovation in consumer finance and digital retailing, and then they are really leaning in on using AI and artificial intelligence in their search algorithms to give the best result to the consumer, which results in a better conversion rate and, again, a very high-quality lead to dealers.”
CarGurus allows dealerships to list their inventory for free, though it offers additional listings features for a fee. It counts more than 40,000 dealerships on its platform. Of them, nearly 29,000 are paying.
Dealers who pay to use CarGurus will be able to list their inventory on Autolist, Trevisan said.
“We think this gives the dealers who are still free on our site even more reason to become paying subscribers,” he said.
