Three Industry Shifts Reshaping Dealerships in Canada

August 7, 2025

Old cars won’t move, lead forms are ghosted, and the OEMs want your job—time to adapt.

Executive Summary

Dealers across Canada are navigating three key trends reshaping how they move metal:

Aging Inventory & Floor Plan Pressure: Higher interest rates and reduced cross-border sales are creating inventory logjams.
Lead Forms Are Fading—Phone Calls Are Surging: Customers now prefer calling over clicking, but most dealers aren’t set up to capture or convert.
OEMs Are Pushing the Agency Model: Manufacturers want more control, with dealers reduced to fulfillment roles.

Inventory Is Aging—and It’s Costing You

Cars and trucks are sitting longer, and that means higher carrying costs. Why?

Interest rates have cooled buying behavior.
Cross-border wholesaling has slowed down, especially for trucks and SUVs.
OEMs are offering fewer incentives, and EVs in particular are struggling to move without federal rebates.

Previously, dealers could clear out trades quickly by wholesaling them to U.S. buyers, bypassing floor plan interest. Now with tariffs and cross-border tensions, that outlet is drying up. This has closed a convenient wholesale path that some dealers took advantage of to offload aged inventory.

Meanwhile, EVs are stacking up on lots. Without rebates, they’re no longer cheaper than ICE models, and hesitant buyers are defaulting to familiar gas engines especially if they can’t recoup the savings for years.

What can dealers do?

Don’t bury aged units in generic inventory ads. Create separate campaigns to boost visibility for aging inventory and compete with fresh stock in customer feeds.

Digital advertising will optimize well-performing creatives. Unfortunately, your aged inventory is one of the least performant. As a result, mixing your newly added vehicles to aged vehicles in a single campaign is pretty much a visibility death sentece for your agend inventory.

Avoid burying older inventory in general ads. Instead, create separate campaigns to increase their visibility and help them compete with newer stock in customer feeds. Digital advertising optimizes well-performing creative, and unfortunately, aged inventory typically performs poorly. Therefore, combining newly added vehicles with older ones in a single campaign is essentially a death sentence for the visibility of your aged inventory.

Phone Calls Have Replaced Form Fills

There’s been a dramatic shift in how customers reach out. Lead forms are down; phone calls are up—sometimes flipping the old 70/30 ratio completely.

But most dealers aren’t ready for it:

Sales staff aren’t trained for high-intent phone leads.
Calls rarely make it into CRMs.
There’s no visibility or attribution on what’s working.

Why the shift? During the inventory crisis, many dealers left sold cars listed online. Response times were slow, and trust eroded. Customers started calling instead—and they haven’t stopped.

What should dealers do now?

Route click-to-call ads to your BDC or trained staff.
Log calls in your CRM.
Recognize phone leads as serious sales opportunities, not distractions.

If you’re still judging your campaigns by form submissions alone, you’re missing the majority of your leads.

The Agency Model Is Creeping In

OEMs are exploring direct-to-consumer models where the vehicle is sold online and the dealer simply hands over the keys as distribution centers.

This setup limits dealer control over:

Pricing
Back-end profits (warranties, financing)
Customer experience

Even worse, when things go wrong, the customer still blames the dealer—not the OEM.

So what can dealers do?

Unfortunately, OEMs have done this because some dealers have soured the buying experience for some customers and in response, OEMs now want to control the entire buying process.

To combat this, Dealers need to build a better buying experience—and talk about it. Consumers want less time in-store and more clarity online. Make your digital presence reflect how you actually sell cars.