It Must Be Car-Buying Season

Vehicle valuation company Kelley Blue Book said they have seen record-breaking traffic to their website recently. This is more evidence that there is pent-up demand for cars following a harsh winter that kept many buyers home.

KBB said it had more than 31 million visits to its site in March 2014 – more than it has had during any other month in the site’s history. The company said that upwards of 21 million monthly visits originated from KBB.com, while more than nine million additional visits came from mobile platforms.

The company attributes the increased traffic to its successful broadcast and digital media efforts, which it said helped to drive would-be buyers to its informative site. While this is no doubt true, there are other factors in play that may be contributing to this surge of visits to KBB.com.

We recently shared some data from the National Automobile Dealers Association showing a rise in wholesale used car prices. This was the result of dealers across the country “stocking up” on vehicle inventory following a winter in which bad weather slowed vehicle sales.

Taking the NADA and KBB reports together, we think that those dealers who were frantically stocking up might have been onto something: perhaps there is a lot of pent-up demand for new and used vehicles this spring, and we will see crowded car lots in the weeks ahead.

So, what might this mean to you? Well, if you are planning on buying a vehicle in the near future, you may want to hold off until late summer to get the best deal. That’s usually a good strategy in any year, since late summer is when next-year’s models start arriving at dealer lots, and there are many good deals to be had.

However, this year more than most, it may pay off to wait a few months before you go car shopping. If we’re right about what these reports suggest, this season may be a crowded one at dealer lots, and therefore not the best time to get the best deal.