Group buys online car-yard to counter flood of dealers

By RICHARD WOOD

A new car dealer group has bought one of New Zealand's few successful dotcom firms.

The Registered Motor Vehicle Trader Association aims to use the car.co.nz website to lock in a presence before law changes allow many more operators to sell cars.

The purchase price is undisclosed but the three-year-old car.co.nz is claimed to have become profitable a year ago, and now has 59,000 visitors and 2.5 million hits a month.

The online business lists cars at dealer yards nationwide but its special feature is a piece of software that sits on the dealer's computer and automatically feeds data to the website, giving an accurate picture of stock without any effort from the dealer.

Association spokesman Mike Nelson said its goal was to be the leading vehicle trader organisation in the country, offering traders high-level technology solutions.

Using a static site for a year, the association had attracted 600 inquiries or expressions of interest to join.

Nelson said that under legislation soon to be passed by Parliament, the existing 2250 car traders would expand to up to 4500, with some "operating out of a phonebox with no fixed abode, or operating out of car fairs".

The authority would have a code of ethics and high standards, he said.

Car.co.nz would show only members' cars. Customers could therefore be assured they were not buying a "lemon" or dealing with "lemon" traders, said Nelson.

More and more people were buying through the web, he said.

Car.co.nz's staffing of three would grow.

The man selling the site is former Palmerston North car dealer Andre Blenkiron, who bought the domain name and many others in 1997.

He said that in a short time he had all sorts of offers from internet firms wanting to sell him their wares.

In the end he asked a local software firm to create a program that would read a dealer's inventory file and automatically upload it.

"That was the birth of car.co.nz."

Blenkiron said he sold the site because it had become "too involved".

"The resources I had were not enough to continue on."