Rental Car Companies Revamp Remarketing Strategy as OEMs Offload Risk

In the past year, Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group Inc. has shuffled the mix of its rental fleet, adding Ford, General Motors, and smaller foreign companies to an inventory that was historically 90% Chrysler vehicles. It has ramped up its direct sales force, cross-training the team’s 20 members. More importantly, though, the Tulsa, Okla.-based rental car company has made significant strides in its online remarketing efforts, a critical move at a time when fleet operators face the task of remarketing ever-growing numbers of higher-mileage vehicles.

“We’re kind of changing as we get into this more,” said Randy Rawlinson, Dollar Thrifty’s director of remarketing. “We have a group of cars, and we try to get on as many internet sites as we can.”

Dollar Thrifty, along with many of its rental fleet counterparts, have focused more attention lately on “upstream” remarketing, that is, selling grounded vehicles straight off the lot, as opposed to sending them to auction.

Historically, auto manufacturers sold vehicles to fleet operators under guaranteed buyback programs. With “repurchase vehicles,” as they’re called, the carmaker would outline the exact price of the original sale and the repurchase price at the end of term — almost like a lease residual. More recently, though, OEMs have opted to provide fleet operators with “risk vehicles,” those which the rental companies are responsible for remarketing.

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