About as often as I see a business being put on blast on national TV when they do something egregious. There’s enough consumer advocacy groups around that such a frivolous lawsuit would be tossed out at pre-trial.
You are right. Corporation can’t stop customer for posting their contracts, but it can bring some magnitude of heat to the dealership and also maybe to the point of the its closing. I had never seen people posting their contracts except here.
I am not saying that they are bad or anything, but do you know why the #1 reason that they don’t post contracts on public forum? It’s because if they feel that they are happy about the deal, they want to keep it to themselves, not share it with others.
People tend to shy away from posting personal information online. So I assume they view it as a sort of invasion of privacy to post a lease contract online and therefore most consumers shy away from it.
An informed consumer gets all the information from the dealership before signing on the dotted line. What kind of heat can a car manufacturer bring on a dealership? By law the dealership has to disclose the MF & RV on the contract along with any incentives and rebates. So again, how can the manufacturer bring heath to the dealership? They can’t tell them “don’t put the info on the contract”. That’s just nonsense!
No, they can’t post MF and RV on the contract. Who does that? Tell me one bank that does it.
And I mean both.
I just pulled out my US Bank lease and it’s right on there. It says “RESIDUAL VALUE” (it’s not a percent…it’s a dollar amount you just divide that by the MSRP and you get the percent) and then the “rent charge” for the duration of the lease is also included…and with simple arithmetic you come up with the MF.
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So, you figured the RV out, but what kind of arithmetic are you doing to come up with the MF? Sorry to get on you a bit, but I just don’t get it. RV (Percentage) is not stated on the contract. The dollar amount is. So it’s not the residual value. The reason that they do that is to tell the dealer that they are settling it at this amount and there is nothing more or less they are to go by. That doesn’t concern the customer. It’s the bank and the dealer.
True that!
Yes, the residual value IS listed on a lease contract. It’s required by law. The residual value is how much the bank forecasts the vehicle will be worth at the end of the lease. It can be listed as a percent of MSRP or as a dollar amount. It makes absolutely no difference.
On the lease contract you’re also obligated to have the information in regards to how much interest you’re paying. Money factor is just another fancy word for interest you’re paying the leasing company. In this case it’s listed as “rent charge”. The interest (rent charge) you pay is based on the total depreciation of the vehicle and amortized amount. When you have that number and you’re told how much you’re paying in interest (rent charge) you plug it in an app or calculator and you get the percent you’re paying in interest (rent charge) and then convert that to money factor (like converting from inches to centemeters).
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Okay, but who does that kind of work though. Like you saying “plugging in the interest and converting it to the MF?” Only some of LHers would, right?
Its disappointing that every time someone tries to advocate an idea that will improve the customer experience, so many on here try to squash it.
There are ways to make this work, and work well. One idea: Have people send their redacted contract to an offshore person to input the data into a database, paid for with a general fund. Restrict access to the database to people who’ve paid a small fee ($10), or maybe $5 if you contribute a contract. It could be like glassdoor.com.
One person being paid to input the data would ensure the consistency and quality.
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Here is the bottom line. This LH group doesn’t exist unless a certified rep from a dealership takes the time to assist. What this thread is talking about is madness. Just take a second to look at the dealer pages tagged in this group. @Cody_Carter @derekoh1991 @Ryan_Squillace. Literally take the time to look. People know these are the best dealers anywhere around town and all of us can attest to the fact that it takes a lot to post these. Co-workers hate you, management yells at you, you don’t make as much money as most people ect. Why do we do it? I don’t know, but look at the post from the customer who did a 4 car deal with me just yesterday. One of their family members was new to credit. It was so hard to get a deal done for him but I fought and got it and told them it wasn’t for the $75 commission or unit it was to help him build credit here in the United States and establish himself in the long run and I have the power to help with that. What you’re talking about in this thread is so over the top you’ll turn this site it a page of do nothing dealer sales rep that don’t care at all. The good ones will be long gone to the next best thing and LH will be phased out. Let’s keep this going the way it is as it’s a great platform. Maybe the best platform out there.
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There’s a ton of online calculators that will do all the work for you if you just plug in the numbers.
Such as: https://www.calculator.net/lease-calculator.html
The point is, all the information is included in a lease contract as it’s required by law.
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I know Ally posts their residuals every month, but not US Bank. And both certainly don’t the MF. Why is that? It’s because it’s within dealers’ right to make money on the lease. I mean the dealerships have to survive. They aren’t the charitable organizations, you know.
As mentioned above, this is not a new idea, and was only stopped before because it took effort to keep it going. I see the database as being perfectly in line with what I believe the mission of the site to be.
I don’t see the connection of how having a database would cause you to want to stop interacting with the site. I’m assuming that you are making money and not just contributing out of charity.
This is the common misconception that the consumer has. Why would you assume that the dealers are making money? We go below $1,500, $2,000, $3,000 below invoice to sell a vehicle to the customer. Yes, there are incentives to the dealer when the monthly goal is reached. And yes, there is bonuses quarter, half, and per year. But we aren’t making money and the dealerships don’t make money.
Dealerships make money in 2 major ways. As you well recognize, the rate (MF) and the trade.
But since internet shopping has emerged, no one really “makes” money, especially selling new cars.
Anyway, I think that if LH was to have a database, it’s going to be a mess.
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Well of course not every car is profitable. Sometimes, inventory needs to be offloaded, ok.
But there is a need to offload that inventory, so posting here is a mechanism to get that done.
I haven’t seen a non-profit dealership before.
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Interesting conversation here. I have some thoughts and will share them later. One immediate concern is that there’s a lot of noise in the data. Any deal is possible (what’s the largest loss you @dealers have taken on a unit?), but that’s not helpful or informative to the general public if that deal cannot be replicated. We could take a statistical approach (omit outliers, etc.) but we’d need significantly more data, and I suspect we wouldn’t get enough contracts per vehicle to get anything meaningful. It’s also laborious to account for things like region, programs for that particular month, conditional incentives, etc.
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Thanks for the thoughts Michael. Haven’t had the chance to cross paths with you, but I enjoy your wording and thought process so far.
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I think this is a great idea to analyze the lease contracts and have clients post them!
I would say make it an open thread so whoever wants to post their contract with personal information blurred out, allow them to do so and as a community we can have moderators/hackers/brokers verify and go over the details.
Might be a good idea to under the photo have a written breakdown of what the client was presented as well as far as MSRP, rebates, incentives etc.
Hackers will also have a way of verifying the deal that they got was a legitimately good deal and will pave a way for other hackers to analyze and get a similar deal. The lease contract gives a snapshot of the entirety of the lease and every detail one would really in order to analyze.
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