Car Dealerships

kippy

Flemmings on the Tuam road have been building what appears to be a new car showroom for what seems to be ages now.
Today I noticed Quinns (just a bit further out the Tuam road) also building what appears to be a car showroom. (Could be going on a while as well)

I had thought that the bottom had fallen out of the car dealership market, there are plenty of them closed around the place.
Even with that, I would have assumed that dealers learned a bit from that last time out and wouldnt over stretch themselves again.
These buildings look pretty expensive.

Is there really that much of a markup on cars?

Noccy_Mondy

Don't know about the markup or anything, but Colm Quinn setting up his BMW garage right on the doorstep of Monaghans Skoda must be a kick in the teeth for them! I heard somewhere that JJ Flemming is looking for a Mercedes Dealership, Opel served them well over the years, strange that they would want to change.....

colm_mcm

Hasn't JJ fleming been a mercedes commercials dealer for ages?

I seem to remember a neighbour getting a new T1 van from them 20 years ago

Noccy_Mondy

Did he ever deal in merc cars though? I've seen a few start to appear lately.

mickdw

The top franchises insist on a certain standard of sales outlet.
If you want to have a bmw dealership, you have to meet the standard.
A good franchise should be able to support the building of a suitable sales outlet. I believe much of the problems in the collapse were due to bloated businesses and businesses who greedily got into property deals when they should never have.

JoeA3

Flemings did do Merc commercials alright, never passenger cars though. I hadn't heard he was going affer Merc, you'd hope he isn't building that massive showroom on the strength of a "maybe"!
There hasn't been a merc dealership in Galway since the collapse of Cunningham Higgins in 2011.

BMW would insist on a glass palace. I'd heard that BMW were pushing Quinn to set up a Galway operation - he was only Athlone based before this.
As for Monaghans, well as far as I know, they sold/leased the site to Quinn for his new BMW dealership, it was their land... so they mustn't be too bothered by it!

charlieharper

kippy wrote: »

Flemmings on the Tuam road have been building what appears to be a new car showroom for what seems to be ages now.
Today I noticed Quinns (just a bit further out the Tuam road) also building what appears to be a car showroom. (Could be going on a while as well)

I had thought that the bottom had fallen out of the car dealership market, there are plenty of them closed around the place.
Even with that, I would have assumed that dealers learned a bit from that last time out and wouldnt over stretch themselves again.
These buildings look pretty expensive.

Is there really that much of a markup on cars?

In order for every dealership to keep their agency they must build a State Of The Art showroom as part of the Agency terms, if not they'll lose the agency. Not that dealerships have a large amount of finance to do this but more out of the need to keep the agency going.