Cars.com Inc. (NYSE:CARS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Alex Vetter: Sure, Kunal. Thanks for the question. I think your first question was about the competitive landscape in Canada. And I would tell you, it is very analogous to what we saw with Dealer Inspire here in the US, a handful of providers without scale or infrastructure to really generate that scale and needing an investment to expand. And so the D2C platform is fantastic. The best part of that asset are the people that are locally ensconced in their communities and have strong dealer relations and are looking for more product to sell. And so, we’re excited to partner and distribute our technology like Accu-Trade throughout the region where we’ve had steady inbound demand from Canadian dealers, but not a real fulfillment capability to serve the market in real time.

And so, we’ve now rapidly built in distribution throughout the country. I think on the dealer count side, look, yes, we’ve been on a dealer slide prior to COVID, but you also have to remember, and we documented a chart in our earnings that shows that dealer count. If you look at where some of that dealer growth or dealer loss came from has been the fall of digital dealers. It largely scaled up over the last few years as companies like Vroom, Carvana, Shift, Tred, CarLotz expanded virtual dealerships and those businesses have a lot bigger challenges that resulted in a pullback of close to 700 dealerships falling out of our dealer count. I think the key to growing dealer count is provide incredible value, which we have through our organic traffic value delivery, our website solutions and our technologies and tools.

But what’s also important is having a robust service and support network that meets them where they are. And so, we’re established in the market, and we see great opportunity to continue to grow dealer sales.

Sonia Jain: I just want to maybe add a couple more thoughts to that, which is, we did experience dealer losses during COVID. But post-COVID, essentially post kind of Q2 of 2020, we were on a very steady progression upwards in terms of dealer customer additions. And I would attribute it to a couple of different things. I think our investments in the business to improve traffic, the quality of our SEO, the strength of our organic audience, expansion of our product suite on the solutions side, which is another sort of avenue by which dealers can get to know our marketplace. I think that’s important to know. We have seen a little bit of pressure in the last several quarters on the dealer customer number, which as Alex mentioned, is very much attributable to some of the challenges, certain digital dealers we’re experiencing over, call it, the last year, which then resulted in them pulling back advertising spend when their business models were going through those challenges.

But we were on a very steady clip of dealer customer growth and have — actually dealer customer growth even prior to COVID. So that trend has been there. It’s just a little bit more under pressure the last couple of quarters with digital dealers. And then our decision, frankly, to go ahead with marketplace repackaging, which we view as really key to driving future growth in the business a) because it gives our customers access to a broader access to our platform, which improves their performance. We’ve seen it in inventory term times. We’ve seen it in ad efficiency and drive value in the future. So I just wanted to provide that additional color.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And our next question is from Marvin Fong from BTIG. Your line is open.

Marvin Fong: Great. Thanks for taking my question. Congratulations on the quarter. Just a broader question, I guess, seeing as how you’re active in M&A again. Just — I know that you are now back-up to sort of the upper end of your leverage ratio, but could you just kind of talk about your appetite for additional M&A or was this more like a one-off opportunistic acquisition? And then I have a follow-up.