Used car sales: We’re a million-vehicle land
How many used cars are registered, bought and sold in New Zealand every year? How about way more than 1.1 million?
Latest used car registration and change of ownership figures supplied by the New Zealand Transport Agency show that with three months of the year to go, the number of transactions has passed 857,000.
That’s way ahead of last year – at the end of September 2016 the figure stood at 843,940 and ended the year at 1,122,003. That would indicate that this year the total is going to close in on 1.2 million.
The latest figures for 2017 have been made public via Turners, the country’s biggest buyer and seller of used cars, trucks and machinery.
They show that in September there were a total of 94,777 used vehicle transactions, with more than 45 per cent of them in the category known as public-to-public – those are the people buying and selling their vehicles privately and via the likes of TradeMe.
Next-biggest sales category was dealer-to-public, which saw 18,060 transactions in September. This was followed by what are known as ex-overseas registrations – used vehicles freshly imported during the month – which reached 13,645, and public-to-dealer (usually tradeins) which reached 13,074.
At the bottom of the list was dealer-to-dealer transactions, which reached 7019 during September.
Turners says used car transactions are up 1.6 per cent on last year, while new car sales are also up by about 1.6 per cent.
Another point of interest: September also saw the highest number of registered motor vehicle dealers for the eighth month running, stretching to more than 3500 dealers.