Cars watched, 30 June to 31 July
22,352
same car, listed continuously
Analytics Digest / No. 002
Vincero Analytics Digest
No. 002 — Movement in Late JuneNZ dealer retail · used vehiclesData to 31 July 2026
1,026 registered yards observed daily37,627 cars live on the marketPublished monthly by Vincero
Corrected 7 August 2026. This issue first published with wholesale auction stock counted in the national figures. Manheim, whose median listing is $2,001 of damaged and salvage stock, has been removed from every board. The headline moved from 37.4% to 36.5%, and the first-half-to-second-half step from +9.5 points to +9.8. The finding is unchanged: the back half of June sold faster, and it still survives the fixed-panel control. See Method for what stayed in, and why.
Something moved in June. The back half of the month sold a third faster than the front, and the gap holds up under every control we ran against it.
No. 001 measured the market standing still. This issue is the first time we can watch it change — and the first honest month-on-month comparison arrives in No. 003, once July has had its full thirty days.
The 30-Day Sell-Through
36.5%
of the 15,137* cars we saw first listed on a New Zealand dealer yard in June found a buyer within 30 days. The other 63.5% were still on the yard a month later. Among the cars that sold, half went inside 8 days and three-quarters by day 17 — that is a speed measured on the sellers only, not on the whole cohort. Week one banked 45.8% of the month’s result.
* Cars first listed on a dealer yard within Vincero's coverage. We observe a large share of New Zealand's registered dealers daily and estimate that at around 90% of national dealer retail listings — an estimate, and one that rises as coverage grows. This is not a complete census of the market.
| Cumulative sell-through | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| By day 7 | 16.7% | |
| By day 14 | 24.9% | |
| By day 21 | 31% | |
| By day 30 | 36.5% |
Board 01 · The movement
June did not run at one speed
1–15 June
31.9%
n=7,914
16–30 June
41.7%
n=7,223
Swing
+9.8
percentage points
The control
A market that looks like it is accelerating is usually a dataset that grew. On a fixed panel of 368 yards watched right through both halves — same yards, same period, no new coverage — the swing was +10.3 points, wider than the market-wide +9.8. A dataset that simply grew would have shown the opposite.
The back half of June cleared cars roughly a third faster than the front. The timing fits end-of-financial-year clearance: 30 June is the line every yard in the country is trying to get stock across. One month is not enough to call that cause. The step is there, and it holds under the control.
Board 02 · Pricing
The cliff is the first step, not the last
| First asking price | Cars | Sold in 30d | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under $10k | 3,170 | 52.0% | |
| $10k – $20k | 4,624 | 36.4% | |
| $20k – $30k | 2,696 | 31.0% | |
| $30k – $50k | 2,330 | 28.1% | |
| $50k + | 1,612 | 26.3% |
A car under $10k is roughly twice as likely to sell in its first month as one over $50k. Most of the fall happens on the first step.
Board 03 · Age
The newer the car, the slower it sells
| Build year | Cars | Sold in 30d | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-2006 | 582 | 54.1% | |
| 2006 – 2010 | 1,258 | 55.1% | |
| 2011 – 2015 | 4,166 | 39.4% | |
| 2016 – 2020 | 4,534 | 36.0% | |
| 2021 + | 4,492 | 26.6% |
It holds again this month, and it is the line dealers argue with most: the freshest stock on the yard is the slowest to leave it.
Board 04 · Segments
Electrified stock is slow and stays dear
| Segment | Cars | Sold 30d | Median ask | Cut | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mainstream Jdm | 5,179 | 42.7% | $18,500 | 16.8% | |
| Korean | 840 | 41.8% | $24,990 | 21.0% | |
| American | 930 | 41.7% | $21,990 | 15.5% | |
| Luxury Prestige | 2,128 | 37.9% | $28,900 | 21.7% | |
| Euro Continental | 785 | 36.9% | $22,995 | 20.4% | |
| Commercial Van | 396 | 36.6% | $33,990 | 17.5% | |
| Performance | 157 | 36.3% | $21,995 | 18.5% | |
| Cheap Jdm Import | 505 | 36.2% | $12,495 | 14.8% | |
| People Mover | 571 | 31.2% | $16,500 | 21.2% | |
| Ute 4wd | 1,402 | 30.0% | $35,980 | 17.7% | |
| Ev Hybrid | 1,932 | 21.1% | $24,850 | 14.1% |
For the second issue running, electrified stock is the slowest segment on the market and the leastdiscounted. Yards are holding price hardest on the metal that sits longest. Everything else that sells slowly gets cut. This doesn’t.
Board 05 · Origin
The Chinese brands ask more and wait longer
| June cars | Sold 30d | Live stock | Median ask | Cut | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chinese brands | 495 | 26.5% | 1,125 | $39,995 | 17% |
| Everything else | 14,642 | 36.9% | 34,826 | $21,750 | 17.7% |
BYD, MG, GWM, Haval, LDV, Chery, Omoda, Jaecoo and Geely now make up 3.1% of everything listed in the country. They ask $39,995 against $21,750 for the rest of the market, and they sell 10.4 points slower. They are counted here by marque, because the market’s segment taxonomy has no origin field for them yet.
Board 06 · Repricing
Four in five sitting cars keep their price
Median move on those that cut
$-1,000
18.2% came down
Of 22,352 cars listed continuously across both checkpoints, 4,062 came down, 558 went up, and 17,732 did not move at all. Across the live market, 23.6% of stock has had its price moved in dollar terms at some point in its life.
Board 07 · Yards
Size sets the floor, not the ceiling
| Yard size (live stock) | Yards | Median | Top decile |
|---|---|---|---|
| under 100 | 89 | 35.7% | 63.3% |
| 100-199 | 35 | 30.8% | 48.2% |
| 200+ | 27 | 30.6% | 48% |
Smaller yards turn faster. But the distance between the median yard and the top decile is wider than the distance between any two tiers — which is the finding. How much stock you carry sets your floor. It does not set your ceiling.
No yard is named
One Christchurch operation alone holds four dealer registrations across three addresses and a single website. Until that can be resolved into one business, a league table would compare a whole yard against a slice of a group. Distributions survive that; rankings do not.
Board 08 · Regions
Auckland is the biggest, the fastest and the cheapest
| Region | Cars | Sold 30d | Live stock | Median ask | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Auckland | 8,670 | 41.6% | 16,164 | $17,995 | |
| Canterbury | 1,732 | 30.8% | 4,666 | $21,990 | |
| Waikato | 1,411 | 26.3% | 4,191 | $34,990 | |
| Bay Of Plenty | 1,003 | 26.9% | 2,690 | $36,990 | |
| Wellington | 787 | 29.5% | 2,763 | $20,995 | |
| Otago | 501 | 35.3% | 1,372 | $16,995 | |
| Manawatu Wanganui | 361 | 30.2% | 992 | $28,990 | |
| Gisborne | 193 | 37.8% | 564 | $27,985 | |
| Hawkes Bay | 131 | 42.0% | 201 | $3,810 |
The regions carrying the dearest stock are the slowest to move it.
Method
Coverage
We observe a large share of New Zealand's registered dealers every day and estimate that at around 90% of national dealer retail listings, rising as more yards come into coverage. Every figure here describes the cars we observe. Rates and distributions carry across the gap; absolute counts are a floor, not a national total.
The cohort
Every retail listing first seen 1–30 June 2026, excluding left-censored records and relists, each observed for a full 30 days. “Sold” means confirmed or presumed sold within 30 days of first listing. Prices are asking prices, not transaction prices.
The control
The stable panel is the 368 yards first observed on or before 5 June holding at least five live cars at both 30 June and 31 July. Like-for-like price movement compares the same vehicle listed continuously across both checkpoints.
What we excluded
Manheim, a wholesale auction house whose median listing is $2,001 of damaged and salvage stock, along with salvage yards and dismantlers. We do notexclude a yard for having “wholesale” in its name: most of them are ordinary retail, listing about half their stock in a month like everyone else. 25 yards whose June listings were mostly relists are held out of the yard board. And a small number of records whose build year or model was clearly a parsing failure are dropped everywhere.
Where Turners sits
Turners is in these figures. It sells retail to the public and leaving it out would remove too much of the real market. Two caveats come with it. It carries about 1.8% of live stock but supplies roughly a fifth of any month’s new listings, so a measure built on new listings weights it heavily. And every branch in the country is filed under one trader record at an Auckland head office, so it cannot appear in the yard board, which needs one row per yard. Both resolve when the corpus can identify branches.
What we suppressed
region: tasman_marlborough_nelson (n=85 < 120); region: southland (n=69 < 120); region: northland (n=67 < 120); region: taranaki (n=15 < 120). We would rather show a gap than a number we can’t stand behind.
Not published
Month-on-month sell-through movement. July’s cohort is not complete until 30 August, so it arrives in No. 003. Raw price-change counts are withheld too: the source flaps between price formats, so a “change” is often no change at all. Everything above is computed from dollar movements only.
The cadence
Sell-through always reports the priormonth. A month’s 30-day cohort cannot be complete until 30 days after that month ends, so the digest carries a deliberate lag rather than a fast, wrong number.
Next issue. No. 003 lands in early September with the first true month-on-month comparison — June against July, both fully observed.
Get the digest by email. One issue a month, the findings and the numbers behind them.
Every figure is drawn from the Vincero market engine — the same corpus that powers repricing, competitor tracking and market analytics inside the Vincero platform.