Carvana has now acquired its 7th Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram dealership, adding a Cleveland-area store this week and continuing a quiet but very deliberate expansion into franchised retail.
This didn’t happen overnight.
Carvana entered the franchise space in early 2025 with its first CDJR store in Arizona.
Since then:
That concentration is not accidental.
Two realities are driving this:
That is meaningfully below the ~$55M averages seen in other franchise transactions.
There is also a timing factor.
Stellantis recently updated its policy to limit ownership to one CDJR acquisition per 12-month period. This latest purchase may effectively cap Carvana’s ability to keep buying within the brand this year.
On the Automotive State of the Union, Paul J Daly and Kyle Mountsier framed this clearly:
This is not just about selling new cars.
These rooftops function as:
Building that from scratch takes time and capital.
Buying it is faster.
Erin Kerrigan and the Kerrigan Advisors team, through The Blue Sky Report®, has been tracking a shift in performance expectations.
Her work points to:
There is debate around how those numbers translate at the store level. But the direction is clear: expectations are changing.
The reaction across the industry is not uniform.
Different perspectives. Same underlying signal: people are paying attention.
Outside the industry, early feedback is mixed but instructive:
The model is changing. The outcomes are still forming.
Carvana is not operating these stores like a traditional dealer group.
It is integrating them into a system built around:
That does not replace the dealer model.
But it does raise expectations around:
Seven stores is not scale.
But it is enough to show intent.
What happens next depends on:
Is Carvana building a new kind of dealer group? Or building a faster, more efficient system around the one it already has?
Kerrigan Advisors is the leading sell-side advisor and thought partner to auto dealers nationwide. Since its founding in 2014, the firm has led the industry with the sale of more than 300 dealerships generating more than $10 billion in client proceeds, including two of the largest transactions in auto retail history – the sale of Jim Koons Automotive Companies to Asbury Automotive Group and Leith Automotive to Holman. The firm advises the industry’s leading dealership groups, enhancing value through the lifecycle of growing, operating and, when the time is right, selling their businesses. Led by a team of veteran industry experts with backgrounds in investment banking, private equity, accounting, finance and real estate, Kerrigan Advisors is the only firm in auto retail exclusively dedicated to sell-side advisory, providing its clients the assurance of a conflict-free approach.
Kerrigan Advisors monitors conditions in the buy/sell market and publishes an in-depth analysis each quarter in The Blue Sky Report®, the industry authority on dealership buy/sell market trends and valuations and includes Kerrigan Advisors’ signature blue sky charts, multiples and analysis for each franchise in the luxury and non-luxury segments. To download a preview of the report, click here. The firm also releases The Kerrigan Index™ comprised of the seven publicly traded auto retail companies with operations focused on the US market. The Kerrigan Auto Retail Index is designed to track dealership valuation trends, while also providing key insights into factors influencing auto retail. To access The Kerrigan Index™, click here. To read the 2024 Kerrigan Dealer Survey, click here. To read the 2025 Kerrigan OEM Survey, click here. Kerrigan Advisors also is the co-author of NADA’s Guide to Buying and Selling a Dealership.
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