Remarketing Nip tuck
Ex-fleet vehicles are not getting any younger and mileages are creeping up. Jack Carfrae examines the state of play with vehicle refurbishment.
he white-hot flame that was Cazoo burned out in May, and remarketing experts often make mention of its embers. In case you blinked and missed it, the firm – launched in 2018 by Zoopla and Lovefilm founder Alex Chesterman – promised to revolutionise the used car market by offering online sales and home deliveries, with a side order of subscription. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange for a stratospheric £6.5bn in August 2021, but that was too close to the sun, and it canned its subscription arm in June 2022 and called time on the used car business almost two years later. The brand remains as a used car website a la Auto Trader but is now owned by
Motors.co.uk. Part of the company’s strategy was to get its arms around as much of the UK’s remarketing sector as it could, including several refurbishment specialists, such as SMH Fleet Solutions – which was closed in March 2023 – and Greenhous, with the facilities dedicated to Cazoo’s vehicles, which constrained capacity in the sector.
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Refurbishment facilities felt it acutely, not least because they were facing other pressures, such as technician and parts shortages. In July, two months
26 | November/December 2024 |
www.businesscar.co.uk
“The age and mileage profile of product coming
through the lanes is getting worse, it’s older stuff, it’s high mileage. That comes with prep costs.”
after Cazoo’s closure, the Vehicle Remarketing Association (VRA) described “substantial bottlenecks in preparing cars and vans for sale”. Things changed in the second half of the year, though, as remarketing experts now say the backlog has largely cleared and that refurb capacity has increased in the wake of Cazoo’s demise. Greenhous bought back its Livingstone and Cold Meece sites – which it previously sold to Cazoo – in October 2023 and February 2024, and they are processing open-market vehicles again. Other specialists have revamped existing refurbishment facilities or are opening entirely new sites, such as City Auction Group, which announced in September that it
was developing a new 28-acre logistics centre at Wittering, near Peterborough.
“Cazoo had hoovered up a lot of capacity within refurbishment centres,” says Marcus Blakemore, chair of the VRA’s industry trends committee, “obviously they are no longer, so those refurbishment centres have been repurposed. Some of our members are now telling us there are new providers knocking on their doors saying, ‘we’ve got capacity’. Having them back again, I think, is a really healthy market for refurbishment.”
The slowdown in the number of ex-fleet vehicles hitting the used market has also made its mark. Few cars and vans were built in 2020 and 2021 and, although the pandemic and the semiconductor shortage are, for the most part, behind us, there is little in the way of sub-four-year-old stock. “If you look at the volume of products at 0-12, 0-24, 0-36 months, it isn’t high,” explains Philip Nothard, insight director at Cox Automotive and VRA chair, “and to a degree, EV products are being held back a little bit by the fleet and leasing and rental sectors, because they don’t want to drop everything in at once and run the risk of huge depreciation again.”
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