CarGurus, Inc. (NASDAQ:CARG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jason Trevisan: Thanks, Sam. And then, John, on your second question on margin targets, and there might have been a second part to the second question. And if so, just remind me what that was when I’m done here. But yes, we still think that the long-term targets from our IR Day, hold. I think the ones to focus on our marketplace product and wholesale. And you can see from that slide that marketplace was already achieving the gross margin targets that we think are long term. They were at the high end of it. Product was close. Now granted, that was as you pointed out, when prices were rising, and it was a better environment. But given all of the operational improvements that you’ve heard us talk about, we still believe that those are the right long-term targets and same with wholesale as well.

And what this doesn’t contemplate is actually echo of what Sam just said, if and as we bring these pieces of the platform together, better over time and we think there are continued marketing synergies and other opportunities as well. But on a standalone sort of independent business line perspective, we think these margin targets are still our long-term goals.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer.

Jed Kelly: Just circling back to the Marketplace segment. I guess could you just assess the visibility in Marketplace going into ’23 and just how we should think about the margins in that segment being back, I guess, to those €˜21 levels that you highlighted? And then, I guess for Sam, can you talk about how dealer engagement is progressing with CarOffer? I mean, is there any KPIs you can just share around more dealers using the product? Thank you.

Jason Trevisan: Sure. Thanks, Jed. It’s Jason. So on Marketplace for ’23, we talked about, I think, in the script, that we continue to see growth into Q4 and into Q1 and from the subscription basis. There are some short-term headwinds on some of the revenue elements like OEM advertising is a good example. But we — but the marketplace business will grow in ’23. From an expense basis, we do have — we’ve highlighted a couple of times that we have the rent of our new headquarters that is being built out, and that’s not insignificant. So, that’s low double-digit millions of additional rent, and we have grow over expenses from some of the hiring that we did in last year. But we have really strong visibility into our Marketplace business given the nature of it and the EBITDA — and strong visibility into EBITDA as well.

And the investments that we’re making outside of rent, I would say, of the new building, the investments we’re making are for new innovation around Digital Retail, Digital Deal and things that we’re confident are going to drive revenue.

Sam Zales: Jed, I’ll jump in. It’s Sam Zales here on CarOffer. Thanks for asking the questions. I think you’ve got to cloud your overall question on cohorts or engagement of dealers with the macro environment. All dealer wholesale transaction volume has been reduced over this period of time as prices declined dramatically in the wholesale arena, just transactions are low overall. So, I don’t dissect that from the operational issues we’ve got, but I think that’s going to put a cloud overall on transaction volume per dealer as we look at the whole market moving in that direction. What I’ll say though is, we’re making the explicit path right now to say, reduced volumes of transactions at CarOffer to create a higher and higher percentage of profitable good transactions.

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