Area is truck country. Check it out:
(Press-Enterprise, The (Riverside, CA) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Sep. 29--A cooling housing market and soaring gasoline prices took their toll on one of the automotive industry's most profitable branches this year, analysts say.
But sales of pickup trucks, while down this year, have bounced back recently in the Inland region, dealers say, largely because of the recent decline in gas prices.
Marshall Gordon, general sales manager at Toyota of Riverside, said sales of the full-size Tundra pickup truck were off by about 40 percent over the summer compared with the year before.
"But now with the lower gas prices and the incentives we've been offering, sales have picked back up," Gordon said.
Average gas prices nationwide hit record highs in the spring and summer, but since then have fallen about 23 percent, according to the American Automobile Association.
Some analysts blame the fall in pickup sales on the softening housing market, which slowed construction work throughout the country. Nationally, sales of big trucks are down 14 percent this year.
Big trucks account for about 25 percent of all sales at General Motors, 27 percent at Ford and 17 percent at DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler. For Toyota, big trucks make up about 4.6 percent of total sales.
A recent report by an analyst at Credit Suisse in New York found that the strength of nation's home-resale market moves in step with full-size pickup sales. Home resales account for about 85 percent of all residential sales in the country, and when those sales rise, pickups sales rise as well, analyst Chris Ceraso wrote.
Home resales dropped nearly 13 percent last month compared with August 2005, the National Association of Realtors said this week, and the Commerce Department reported new-home sales in the Western states were down 17 percent.
Over the past three months, trucks in Southern California sold at the same rate as those in the rest of the country, said Tom Libby, an analyst with J.D. Power & Associates' Power Information Network. The group tracks how long a vehicle sits on a dealership lot before being purchased. In Southern California, the average was three months.
Still, Inland dealers say the region is different.
"The Inland Empire has been a little bit resilient to the real estate slowdown," said Nick DePasquale, general manager at Fairview Ford in San Bernardino. He said the region tends to lead the country in truck sales.
"This is a big truck community, so a lot of people bought trucks in spite of the gas prices," he said.
DePasquale said during the peak gas prices, pickup sales were off about 25 percent from the previous year. However, he said fleet sales remained the same.
"Some of the big clients don't have any choice -- they have to buy work trucks," he said.
Bill Hatfield, owner of Hatfield Buick and GMC Truck in Redlands, said pickup sales remained steady despite the higher summer gas prices.
"There is a love affair with trucks in California," he said.
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
To see more of The Press-Enterprise, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.PE.com.
Copyright (c) 2006, The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Calif.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
Technorati
Del.icio.us
Slashdot
Digg
