Leasing and financing app Rodo is swinging into July with a new partnership set to funnel an estimated 300,000 users to its platform. The deal comes on the heels of a notably profitable month of orders in June, Patrick McKeever, vice president of sales, told Auto Finance News.
Rodo is partnering with Boston-based Motus, a management solution company that facilitates reimbursements between employers and employees. Through Motus, employees track gas and mileage on personal cars for compensation. A rising problem, however, is that users log thousands of commuted miles on personal vehicles without a streamlined way to purchase a new car, said Todd Gebski, chief strategy officer at Motus.
“Our partnership with Rodo will now allow us to provide the mobile workforce with the means to lease or purchase the vehicles of their choices without the fuss of the dealership sales process,” Gebski said. “By partnering with Rodo, we’re bringing extended benefits to our drivers, who can now more easily find the car that suits their needs, obtain the best price available and quickly get behind the wheel.”
As part of the deal, Rodo will have access to a new catalog of users numbering 300,000, McKeever said. The financing app can then further provide its dealers with a group of “highly engaged, fully employed consumers who have to get a car,” he noted.
The news of the partnership coincides with news of Rodo’s profitable operations, which have been tracking positively the past several months, McKeever said, despite an industrywide downward sales trend. While McKeever did not cite specific numbers, he said order accounts on new cars through the app have more than doubled in the last eight weeks.
“We just had our best month ever in June,” McKeever added. “We have signed dealers and, in a lot of our markets, we are in pretty good shape. We’ve got plenty of inventory showing on the app or the web.”
Rodo recently added store groups in Ohio and southern New Jersey, where the company is focusing on brands and areas with a weaker digital footprint. Rodo has additionally seen an increase in app traffic as download, registration and orders “are at their highest levels that we’ve seen since the company’s inception,” McKeever said.
Rodo employees are still working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but productivity hasn’t been stunted, McKeever said. “We’re actually really proud and actually kind of blown away with the amount of work we’ve all been able to do.”
New York-based Rodo, which debuted as Honcker in late 2016, has been on the aggressive growth trajectory since then. Most recently the company expanded its product to offer new-vehicle financing, and in late 2019 launched a national radio advertising campaign through iHeart Radio to gain a foothold in states unfamiliar with its brand.
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