Rising confidence raises hopes of strong end to 2024

With consumer confidence on the rise, Auto Trader is predicting a strong used car market in the second half of 2024, raising hopes that residual values could stabilise.

“There are good economic signals,” said Auto Trader director of automotive finance Rachael Jones on the latest Fleet News Market Insight recording with Auto Trader.

“From a new car perspective, obviously we still see flatlining retail sales, but we do see on our platform a 28% growth in interest in new cars. It just needs that conversion piece to happen.”

Auto Trader also saw a 12% year-on-year jump in interest for used cars in June, which represents the highest rate of demand growth in 15 months. Days to sell are also looking strong, reports Jones.

“Our average days to sell is now 29 days, which is three days faster than last year and five days less than 2019,” she said.

“Obviously, there's some pockets of supply where it's been softening, particularly in the under five-year-old market, but that's creating quite an overall healthy market in the sense that supply is worse than demand.”

She did flag some areas to monitor, in particular supply of one-to-three year old cars.

Nevertheless, “we're calling a used car market of 7.6 million transactions in 2024 which will be up 5% year on year”, Jones added.