There was a thread on this forum about whether or not a buyer should target aged units and use the age to negotiate a deal. The angle presented in this thread was to discuss the flooring line (the debt many dealerships take on to finance their inventory). Turns out, nobody cares about the flooring line.
Instead, the general premise is that aged inventory typically has more incentives on the hood since the showroom is managing its inventory to clear out aged stock. But, this type of policy is usually set at a pay grade above your normal frontline sales associate or even some sales managers.
So if you come off the street and say “hey brother, your Ariya is about to hit 365 days on the lot, I want 35% off” … the sales person will probably just tell you to go pound sand since the sales person doesn’t care how aged the unit is. They only know the box they’re allowed to operate in, and your 35% is outside of that box.
As a buyer, It’s kind of a catch-22 to chase aged stock. The primary reason a dealership gets such aged stock is because their GM/Flooring Manager are stubborn and demand maximum profit per unit. So the sales team is probably rejecting a lot of reasonable offers (offers nearby showrooms are clearing).
This results in aged inventory, but if you come in on day 365, it’s not like the dealership has suddenly become wise to using discounts to move metal. So you won’t see big discounts just because the car is old.
I’ve had a FM of a low-volume dealership with a captive audience tell me they’d rather take a L sending a aged unit to auction, than drop price and clear the unit to a buyer. Because they don’t want to be known as a place to go for big discounts. This helps raise their average transaction price since nobody is getting discounts from them… and their capitive audience will over-pay.
Where you see the greatest discounts are when these stubborn dealerships do a dealer swap to move stagnant inventory to someone else to clear at a low price. The swapped vehicle may be “fresh” to the new dealership, but their bank will still recognize it as old collateral, and put pressure on to move that metal. The volume showrooms that receive aged stock in a swap will be much more open to a triple-net deal to blow it out.
Unfortunately, it’s really hard to trace a dealer swap like this. There’s no rule of thumb for saving money chasing aged inventory.