So I’ve been looking for a Lincoln Corsair Grand Touring lease for my girlfriend. I work for Ford so I’m trying to get the employee pricing for her. I have been looking at some inventory in the surrounding states and have found quite a few 2024’s with over a year on the lot. They also have the Red Carpet Lease Program with $9750 incentive. The A Plan pricing said it should be around $4750 off. I’m hoping with the time on lot I could get maybe a 15-20% discount off MSRP.
This would be my first time doing any sort of lease deal so I’m just trying to figure out how much of a discount I can reasonably expect with this much time on lot. I’ve seen some threads on here discussing how some SMs are willing to sit on a car this long and will still tell you to go pound sand. From my understanding of how dealerships work, you have 2 costs for having a car sitting on the lot: the holding costs & the opportunity cost. The holding costs from my search can be anywhere from $17-85/day per car ( Hold the Holding Costs; Dealers & Experts Discuss Inventory Holding Cost Erosion). One car I’m looking at is at 510 days on the lot so that could be anywhere from $8670 - $43,350 just in holding costs!!! Then when you consider that the ideal vehicle turn-over rate is 30 days on the lot (the real average is closer to 60 days) (How to Calculate Inventory Turnover for Car Dealerships) that means you are aiming to be selling a car every 1 - 2 months. Assuming you are making a 8-10% profit per vehicle, that means this dealership has potentially missed out selling another 8 vehicles. An 8-10% profit on 8 similar MSRP vehicles ($50,000-55,000) would have netted them about $35,000.
So I guess my question is, why wouldn’t they take a deal at even 50% discount? They’ve already potentially lost the whole value of the vehicle at this point. I would wanna just get rid of it as soon as possible if I were them!
I know their other option is to wholesale the vehicle but why would that be a better option?
Welcome to LH. Have you used the LH calculator to see whether these are even hackable with that type of discount assumed, given the current lease programs? I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen a lincoln posted here… For what it’s worth, I recall @aronchi mentioning how he stopped posting lincoln deals because of how poor they lease, if that’s any indication of their market.
Yeah, used the calculator. It came out to about $127 a month. 32.5 LH score. The only issue is it keeps coming back saying there’s no data on the 2024s (I looked a couple weeks ago and they had it but now its saying no data for some reason so I just used the 2025 rates). What makes them so poor to lease?
not sure why you’d use 25 programs on 2024s, but there are no subvented lease programs on 2024s. hence you’re not going to get a $127/month payment. this brand leases like garbage. pick anything else.
I just found the red carpet lease on the dealer website for the VIN I’m looking for. so I applied the lease programs manually in the calculator. That’s where I got the $9750 Red Carpet Lease and then I’m also applying the $4750 for the A Plan Employee pricing (why I want to do a Lincoln so I can keep the employee pricing
You are a super supporter, so you can lookup the programs for 25 model / trim / term combination you’re eyeing up, and should be able to verify… sounds like it will be a waste of time, though.
Historically Lincoln has made their leasing programs not very attractive with either/or high money factors or low residual values or little to no lease cash. Hence part of the reason why you are seeing these cars sit on dealer lots for so long. A good indication of how bad they typically lease is the lack of exposure Lincoln gets on this forum. If they had attractive lease plans, they would have a presence here.
Many Lincoln buyers are still an old school mentality of I’m paying cash or I’m financing .. but only for 3 years max. Typical Lincoln consumers are not leasers.
When a dealer has a car celebrate its lot birthday it is pretty clear that they don’t subscribe to conventional business school ideas on carrying costs and opportunity cost. Dealerships like that are often the worst to deal with. You can throw out a number and see what they do but there is likely a reason they have sat on the car while its value trickled away and lease support ended.
