Gillrie said he has noticed in recent months that Reynolds appears to have stepped up its approach to winning over dealerships: “We’re seeing them go more rounds than they did before and put up better deals than they did before.”
At the same time, Cox Automotive leaders say Dealertrack is close on Reynolds’ heels, with rapid growth over the past five years.
“Just looking mathematically, our prediction is that we’ll tie or surpass the No. 2 provider in the not-too-distant future. And so we’re excited about that,” Keith Jezek, president of Cox Automotive’s retail solutions group, said in a January interview.
A privately held company, Cox would not provide details of its dealership customer count or recent growth percentages. Automotive News could not independently verify the claim.
Increasingly, dealers have more places to go.
A year ago, dealership technology company DealerSocket acquired DMS provider Auto/Mate. CEO Sejal Pietrzak said the company aims to provide dealerships “a one-stop shop” across all of its products. Other companies also have their sights on growth: Dominion DMS is rolling out its Vue platform, which company President Sharon Kitzman said is cloud-native and underpinned by Microsoft’s Azure. And DealerBuilt CEO Mike Trasatti said the company recently finished an infrastructure and integration overhaul that now allows the company to invest in developing new products.
The number of U.S. franchised dealerships has held fairly steady at roughly 18,000, so winning DMS business generally means poaching retailers from competitors. Particularly for larger groups, a DMS provider must work with multiple automakers to be considered.
“It’s a lot of work to be a DMS system,” said Abigail Kampmann, CEO of Principle Auto in San Antonio, with eight dealerships in three states. “You have to have a lot of relationships with the manufacturer, and you have to have a lot of integration with them. So if somebody wants to go down that path, they have a big investment to take.”
Principle Auto last year switched from CDK to Dealertrack as it sought the ability to integrate its own data tools and dashboards, as well as better pricing and customer service, Kampmann said. The group looked at four vendors.
Casey Coffey, COO of Greenway Automotive Group of Orlando, said the 46-store group switched to CDK in 2020 after nearly 30 years with Reynolds and its predecessor. Greenway was looking for better integration with third-party software vendors, which Coffey said is the most important feature any DMS provider can offer today.
“The more that a DMS provider can make that available to a dealer or dealer group,” he said, “the easier it is going to be to create conversion and adoption.”
Hannah Lutz contributed to this report.
