Cars.com at JPMorgan Conference: Navigating Market Challenges

On Tuesday, 13 May 2025, Cars.com (NYSE:CARS) participated in the 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference. The company outlined its strategic direction amid economic uncertainties, highlighted by tariff-related challenges. Despite these hurdles, Cars.com reported solid dealer growth and maintained confidence in its ability to achieve year-over-year revenue growth, even as it suspended revenue guidance due to OEM uncertainties.

Key Takeaways

• Cars.com is experiencing robust dealer growth, with significant organic traffic and brand loyalty.
• Revenue guidance was suspended due to OEM uncertainty, but the company expects revenue growth.
• Focus on cost management and strategic integrations, including share buybacks.
• Expansion of software solutions like AccuTrade to enhance dealer services.
• Positive dealer sentiment and strategic initiatives signal potential business upturn.

Financial Results

• Revenue guidance was suspended due to potential tariff impacts from OEMs.
• Cars.com still anticipates year-over-year revenue growth.
• Q1 margins exceeded expectations, supporting the company’s financial stability.
• The company executed $22 million in share buybacks in Q1 and plans to continue aggressively.
• One third of OEMs increased their spending in Q1, reflecting a positive trend.

Operational Updates

• Solid dealer growth was recorded in February, March, and April.
• The Canadian division continues to gain market share.
• Nearly 100 new dealer websites were launched in the quarter.
• Growth in software solutions, including the AccuTrade tool for inventory management.
• Integration of platforms in Q1 to streamline operations.
• Over 2,500 dealers signed up for Dealer Club, with over 1,000 conversions.

Future Outlook

• Confidence in maintaining EBITDA margin guidance remains strong.
• Anticipation of growth acceleration with new car investments from OEMs.
• Expectation that 2026 will be a pivotal year for Dealer Club.
• Plans to integrate AccuTrade with the wholesale marketplace in real time.
• Focus on repackaging website bundles to encourage tier upgrades and market expansion.

Q&A Highlights

• The business is partly cyclical, with media revenue being more discretionary.
• Dealer additions are driven by consumer trends and competitive pressures.
• Cars.com differentiates itself through brand strength and expert content.
• The company focuses on cross-selling and value to improve retention.
• Cars.com is poised to be a key player in the automotive marketplace, despite competition.

In conclusion, Cars.com’s strategic initiatives and market positioning were thoroughly discussed at the conference. For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference:

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: All right. Great. Thanks everyone for joining. Thanks everyone on the webcast for joining as well.

My name is Rajat Gupta, member of the Automotive Equity Research team at JPMorgan. Very pleased to have with us the team from Cars.com, Alex Wetter and Sonya, CFO, as well as Catherine from IR in the audience. So maybe Alex, if you want to spend like a couple of quick minutes just to quickly go through last quarter results, just give us like a State of the Union update on the industry, where your business is and then we can go into some deeper questions.

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: Sure. Well, first of all, core business trends are all improving in a really nice and healthy way. And we’ve seen this cycle before. The business has been through a lot of different economic cycles that the industry goes through. But people really should know is that auto is a pretty resilient industry, right?

Unless you live in New York or San Francisco where you think cars are a luxury, the rest of the world needs a car to get to work, get to a job. And even in the ’eight, ’nine recession, I think auto was back to 25%. We still sold like nearly forty fifteen million new. So despite what some people think of cars as a luxury, it’s proven out to be very much a necessity to people’s lives. And so this cycle is no different.

We’re seeing great growth on the consumer trend. Even with the tariff news, consumers are flocking to our marketplace proactively and opportunistically to make sure they can scour the internet for deals. And importantly, had solid dealer growth in February. We said solid dealer growth in March. We followed that in April with solid dealer growth.

And that’s just not on our marketplace, but also our software solutions and dealer tools. And the reason that’s important is that a lot of people hear the name Cars.com, they think singular website. They don’t always take time to realize that like we’re powering over 8,000 retail websites. We’re powering technologies that reside on OEM websites. And so we collect subscription or SaaS based revenue from a lot of different participants in our ecosystem.

And generally the whole industry is moving towards digital. I think the consumer has already moved years ahead of the industry. The industry is now shifting away from investing in physical showrooms and huge splashy national launches towards more digital focused first solutions and technologies to reach consumers where they are.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Understood. That’s helpful color. Is there a way to cut your business between cyclical and non cyclical components? In other words, there’s obviously a lot of ancillary media solutions that are incorporated in the monthly average revenue per dealer that you report. I’m curious if there’s a way to split that across the more durable listings and the more cyclical advertising spend.

Sonya, CFO, Cars.com: Yeah, I mean if you think about maybe discretionary revenue in the business, probably the areas that I would think of as a little bit more discretionary are gonna be on the media side. Dealers aren’t gonna just turn off their websites regardless of the business conditions. I think marketplaces have proven to be durable over the long term. So the exposure is really on the media side. We have an OEM and national business which is a little bit more indexed into new activity and largely media weighted.

So that’s an area where we’ve seen a little bit more variability since a lot of the tariff noise and tariff announcements started coming out as they want to plan more month to month and evolve their media strategies to the market environment. Similarly, we do have a heavier mix of franchise dealers, so roughly two thirds of our dealers are franchise, and those dealers also are a little bit more indexed into new car related There’s a component that’s always on and then there’s a component that’s a little bit more tied to new model launches, incentive plans, and those are a little bit more up in the air in the current environment.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Understood. Going back to your comments around the dealer additions that you’ve seen recently, February, March, and April, sounds like. Are there like two or three key reasons that you would point to that drove that after, I would say, a pretty stable last couple of years? What’s driven this recent uptick? Why should it continue?

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: Yeah, well, look, think dealers tend to react in real time. They’re retail operators. They make changes much faster than any other participants in the industry. And I think going into this year, there was a lot of apprehension of recession, what’s going to happen. And you just saw dealers start to panic and pull back.

Now you’re looking at consumer trends not only being very durable, but actually growing in interest and dealers are looking at that saying, wait a minute, I need to get in this game. There’s still cars to be sold. I have to compete for that volume. And we tend to get the majority of our traffic organically and directly. And so when you sit outside of our ecosystem, there are definitely lost market share opportunities.

90% of our audience comes to us undecided between make model and dealer selection. And so if you’re not in that ecosystem, they’re finding your peers. And so there is a dealer recognition now that like, okay, wait a minute, the world’s not ending. It’s still going to be a healthy year this year in automotive. It’s a good market.

I need to compete for my share of sales. And I think that led to a lot of dealer growth. I would also say like our Canadian business continues to take market share. We had lots of dealer website growth. Again, highly reoccurring revenue.

I think we had almost a hundred dealer websites in the quarter and that continues to scale. And then growth in our software solutions. Even with new car uncertainty, there’s a natural industry shift towards used cars and more importantly self refurbishing your used car inventory. The legacy models are these traditional auctions where dealers all go and every dealer bids on cars that other dealers couldn’t retail in the hopes that they’ll win them and try even harder to retail that car. The growing trend is actually buying cars from your customers while they are in your service lane.

And so we have a product called Accu Trade that enables dealerships to basically plug in a little device into the dashboard of the car. We take a real time diagnostic, bounce it against our demand and we can give the dealer and the customer a real time guarantee on the car in real time. And now dealers are sourcing buying that inventory because A, they don’t have to bid on it with 20 other dealer friends and B, by buying the car, you’ve now got a customer who needs a new one. And so dealers are becoming much more self sufficient as opposed to lying on these legacy structures and systems and we’re enabling that. And so that’s also exciting growth.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Understood. Now that’s very clear. On the guidance framework that you gave us, you suspended the revenue guidance given some of the uncertainty, but you did maintain the EBITDA margin guidance. Could you highlight some drivers of your confidence and ability to control that margin irrespective?

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: Yeah, we also signaled that we would grow the business this and signaled growth. But I think to Sonya’s point, we’re one of the few marketplaces that actually caters a lot to new car shoppers as well. Most people will tell you, you start out in the market thinking you’re going to buy a new car and about 25% of those people switch into a used car at the point of sale or vice versa, right? OEM incentives. So the Cars.com marketplace caters to both new and used car shoppers.

OEMs started signaling to us in February, March that they could not guarantee us that all the dollars they’ve committed to us would run at least on the same timeframe. So far we haven’t really seen any cancellations, but we’ve seen some delays as OEMs have got cars sitting at port. They’re not going to spend advertising and marketing dollars. So they’ve said hold off a quarter. And it was on that uncertainty we said, hey, we don’t have clarity on the OEM business.

The dealer fundamentals and the consumer fundamentals are strong. I don’t know, Sonya, what else you’d add?

Sonya, CFO, Cars.com: Yeah, no, I think that point on revenue is important, which is we do still expect to be growing on a year over year basis. I think the variability of what that growth looks like on a quarterly basis is a little wider than what it might otherwise look like. But the fact that we expect to grow year over year is part of what gives us confidence in maintaining the margin guidance. And then we do have a number of levers that we have at our disposal to manage the cost structure, some of which we talked a little bit about on our earnings call. We did we did make some adjustments to our cost structure unrelated frankly to tariffs more associated with integration of our platform in Q1 already and we have other levers that we can lean into if needed.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Yeah. No, the first quarter margins were definitely stronger than we had expected for sure. Just to follow-up on that last OEM lack of visibility point. Just over the last week, we’ve seen a lot of changes with The UK tariffs, the China tariffs. It looks like we might see some relief ultimately.

Some cars have started to get released at the ports as well. Any change very recently in those indications that you want to highlight? Any messaging from the OEMs, like more real time?

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: Yeah, look, generally think there’s a macro positive picture here, right? OEMs are saying they know they need to do more digitally. They’re trying to shift more of their budgets away from traditional media to being more digitally proficient and leaning towards technology solutions. Importantly, they’re also looking to enable technologies for their dealers. So we’ve had multiple OEMs come out and endorse Accu Trade as a solution that they’ll co op on behalf of their dealers if they adopt the technology.

So we’re seeing OEMs lean towards digital. We certainly understand if they don’t have cars on dealer lots, they’re not going to spend that discretionary media in the near term. But the picture keeps getting a little bit better every day for the last few weeks that we would expect this to start to unleash. And when that does those new car dollars, if they flow in, not only are they big dollars on the top line, but they’re almost all gross profit

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: revenues.

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: So that can be a boon for the bottom line as well.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Is there a silver lining here where this can actually create a little more demand for the marketplace in a sense there are going be certain OEMs that are in a better position from tariffs, some not. And everyone wants to say price competitive. Is there any indication of anything like that that you’re sensing from the deal?

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: We do have about a third of our OEMs stepped up their spending in Q1. So it wasn’t the majority that we had hoped, but a third still did. And they largely were the OEMs that aren’t impacted. So they’re seeing this as an opportunity that they can take share. We certainly understand why some of the bigger OEMs have got bigger concerns.

And, but when those dollars come in, I think that growth algorithm can certainly accelerate.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Got it. Got it. That’s helpful. I just want to quickly check-in if anyone in the audience has a question here. Not yet.

I’ll just go on, but feel free to raise your hand. Wanted to hoping to touch on competition. From the surface, appears that a wide range of ecosystem participants are building somewhat similar products, addressing bottlenecks such as market intelligence, consumer sourcing, digital transaction and enablement solutions. What’s differentiating Cars.com in this intensifying landscape to some degree? It feels like that, that the competitive landscape is intensifying.

Is there a strategy to continue to out innovate peers or is it more a network effect aspect where your scale is helping you innovate faster and penetrate faster with better solutions?

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: Well, yes, Ann. I’ll start by saying most people don’t realize that you’re only in the market for a car about once every seven years. It’s not something that you’re always thinking about. And so when someone enters the car market, they start really from a base of I don’t know where to begin. Cars.com is part of our differentiation because the brand is so damn good and synonymous with the category that we drive the majority of our traffic organically or directly.

Even despite that there’s like over 200 car websites out there, we’re consistently one of the top most trafficked sites because of our brand strength. And importantly, we’re also unique in that we actually pay pedigreed experts to critically curate the inventory. So if we think a car has been poorly built or isn’t designed in the right way or the model year change took a step back, you will actually get that content from our editors. They will tell a car company that what they built does not meet or exceed a standard that drivers will expect. And so consumers, despite you can search on Instagram and see cars, Google cars, Facebook cars, you will still seek out pedigreed expertise before making a big purchase decision.

Like even Amazon wants to get into the car business. Like everybody wants to be in the car business because it’s a big TAM, it’s a great industry. But I don’t think you can displace the need for people to do research. Average consumer is doing about seven hours online prior to purchase. And that means that they’re collecting a lot of information before they make a big decision.

I think from a differentiation standpoint, certainly I would say our software tools and our solutions are different. We’re not just a marketplace. We’ve got this great marketplace that generates a lot of free cash flow, but we’re going vertically deep and getting into the operating system of the way our dealers work. We’re powering their website, we’re giving them performance analytics, we’re giving them technology and tools that they can appraise cars in seconds. So we’re getting deeper into the food chain, which I think will only increase our stickiness and durability within the industry.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Got it. Got it. No, that makes sense. Could you give us some insights into what the switching costs look like for a dealer to move marketing or even other ancillary solution budgets away from one platform to another or to Cars Commerce? Is there enough flexibility from a data infrastructure standpoint?

Sonya, CFO, Cars.com: So, I mean, I think the switching costs can be they’re hard they’re hard to quantify. I mean, what I can say is on the solution side of the business, you know, particularly if you think about a dealer website, there are there are real switching costs associated with building that website that takes a couple months to do. We’re, I think, a little bit less focused on the switching costs and using that as a lever with dealer customers and more focused on how we can continue to cross sell the platform because one of our observations is when dealers are using more of our products, a couple things happen. One, our ARPD goes up. Two, retention rates improve meaningfully.

And three, which is the reason this is happening, is dealers actually get more value. A good example is dealers who use marketplace plus accu trade. You actually find that they get almost two times in some cases the leads that they would if they were just using marketplace alone. So there is a multiplicative effect for for dealers to adopt more of our platform as opposed to sticking with singular point solutions which would, frankly have a lower switching cost.

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: Right. By the way, just a point of comparison, like dealers who buy cars at auctions or through inspection services are spending around $1,500 to buy a car. With Accu Trade, they’re paying $1,500 a month. And on average dealers are buying 19 cars a month using our software. So there’s no question empowering dealers with their own technology to do this on their own is more profitable to them.

It’s getting dealers to embrace technology and changing their behavior takes a little more time, but the economic payoff is massive.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Got it. Got it. Yeah, I want to because you mentioned Amazon earlier, I wanted to quickly address their initiative with Hyundai, launched to the broader public, know, pretty late last year, early this year. Would love to get your views on what this means for the broader category. How have you reacted if at all to this?

Is there increased emphasis internally to build more end to end digital enablement or perhaps to protect the top of funnel like customer leads?

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: Yeah, look, mean, Amazon made their first announcement to enter into auto in 2017, also with Hyundai. And our strategy, we saw that then. We said basically, let’s make sure that we’re positioned to go vertically deep into the industry. So in effect, our strategy to create durability of our business has always been when a big horizontal giant comes into any industry, you better go vertically deep. And we have through websites, appraisal technology, now wholesale dealer to dealer transactions.

I think we’re well ensconced within our industry. I think Amazon’s ultimate desire is to sell advertising. So if they’re listening, we can be a great reseller of your advertising too. Like we know dealers that want to spend a lot of money and we can use our first party data to retarget shoppers on Amazon. I generally don’t think buying a car is the kind of experience that you read a few reviews on Amazon and you click add to cart.

I think that consumers vacillate between brands all the time in auto. This is one of the few retail categories where actually the purchase funnel widens in the last mile. Talk to any dealership, people come into the physical showroom thinking they’re going to buy one thing and need more time to go consider other makes and models. And so this isn’t a category that converts easily. There’s going to be a lot of expansion of decision making in that last mile.

And I’m pretty certain Cars.com is going to be part of that consideration set and won’t be left out of the shopping cart.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Got it. Got it. Moving to pricing and data insights, during the first quarter call, you laid out plans to roll out additional data insights around consumer shopping behavior, consumer budgets. This clearly looks to it seems like an exciting opportunity. As you weave this into the existing marketplace solution, along with other features that you have in the pipeline, how does Cars Commerce generate incremental revenue for providing this value added offering?

How do you market this? And is it primarily through rate hikes during renewal cycles? Or are you focusing more on pushing dealers to upgrade their packages in order to make most of these solutions? How are you going about that?

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: Yeah, no, totally different. Look, so if you look at the automotive industry today, there is one big monopoly in this industry and it’s Cox Automotive. They’ve acquired 30 software companies and they sell dealerships, tons of software and they raise prices on software every year. But effectively none of it really works together. You think about what we’re building at CarsCommerce, it’s connected technologies that actually work really well together.

So as an example, with Accu Trade, not only can you appraise a car using the predictive data from Cars.com to give the consumer and the dealer here’s what the car is going to be worth over the next thirty, sixty, ninety days. But if the dealer doesn’t want to keep that car, they can one click launch it into our wholesale marketplace dealer club. And that’s the theme that dealers really have told us and driven our strategy by is that they’re tired of logging into 30 different tools to perform 30 different operations. They want more connected software where they can make a change and syndicate information from one store to the next or wholesale car to a marketplace, but do it within a connected suite of tools. And so the cars commerce proposition is exactly that.

We are helping dealers both wholesale and retail cars amongst themselves without having to rely on some large clearinghouse middleman and pay the ransom of the house. And dealers, I think, appreciate that we’re enabling them or arming the rebels, as I like to say.

Sonya, CFO, Cars.com: And and maybe, like, also more specifically to kind of the the lead enhancements that we’re making to marketplace. That’s something that we’re gonna make widely available to dealers. I don’t think we’re gonna we’re not gonna penny pinch on this one effectively. What we’re doing is, I think it’s something like 45% of consumers who come to our site know that they’re gonna purchase a car within thirty days, but there’s a long tail to that where 85% say they’re gonna be it’s it’s maybe a six month outlook for them. So what we’re trying to do is for people who have that longer purchase decision timeline, if they enter and exit kind of the Cars.com marketplace, we’ll let dealers know that they’re still back shopping on our site.

So it’s still a warm lead that they should reengage. Here’s what they’re searching for, and really giving them more contextual data around search behavior or price points that consumers are looking for, which we think will help increase the quality of the lead and the conversion rate that dealers get. I think, you know, on pricing broadly, that’s that’s something we look at regularly, and we try to think about pricing in the context of added value where the dealers are getting something incremental and we’re also getting to nest a little bit of a price increase into that. It changes the tone of the conversation that we have with them a little bit, and I think is part of what drove so much of our success back in 2023 when we did our last major repackaging effort on marketplace. I think important maybe for this group to know that we’ve been busy with our website bundles in Q1, and so we did finish three of those repackaging deals in Q1.

Some of it’s pricing, some of it is taking the different solutions we have and incorporating them into the existing website tiers to give give give our customers reasons to move up tier and up market with us.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Got it. Is there like a minimum price hike that you look to pass on to consumers every year like just to cover general cost inflation or is that just more I would say like ad hoc in nature?

Sonya, CFO, Cars.com: So I think it’s a great question. I think right now from a roadmap perspective we’re not targeting like we’re gonna increase your rate 3% a year because that’s the cost of inflation. It is much more around repackaging. So we do have plans in marketplace for the second half of the year to add kind of a newer top tier package and migrate some of our dealer customers up that curve. But it’s something we look at all the time.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Got it, got it. That’s clear. I wanted to touch on Dealer Club a little bit. Looks a little surprised by the announcement at NADA. Clearly, looks like an exciting growth opportunity.

It’s a bit novel, but simple differentiator in the category that continues to see a lot of competition. You also saw meaningful uptick in prospects on the site after the acquisition. Wondering if you could firstly walk us through the dealer onboarding journey for Dealer Club. How do you solve the chicken and egg problem of establishing reputation on your platform? And then relatedly, what is the strategy of integrating this with the broader marketplace?

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: Yes. So I’ve been following the wholesale industry for a while. Again, Manheim owns the monolith, ADESA in Canada, you’ve got OpenLane and ACV both publicly traded and dealers source inventory through those large established wholesale marketplaces. Dealer Club was invented by the former founder of ACV. Basically based on all his insights in terms of the wholesale market and the vagrancies of arbitration, dealer, buyer, and seller disagreeing on the condition of the vehicles.

So I talked to Joe after his non compete ran out, it was basically about the power of Accu Trade, accurately appraising vehicles using technology. And he had been building dealer club, which was all about trading on reputation. He and I both believe that yes, there are bad actors in every industry and there are some bad dealers out there that seek to deceive both consumers and trading partners, but the vast majority of them just want to move efficiently and trade on information and reliably know that they can trust the people that they want to do business with. So Dealer Club is the first reputation based wholesale marketplace where buyers and sellers rate each other on every transaction. And what we’ve seen initially has been incredible organic growth in interest from the dealer industry.

We had over 2,500 dealers, which is more dealers signing up to enroll for this than any other product that we’ve introduced to the market. Of that, we’ve converted just over a thousand of those dealers in order for them to officially enroll, they’ve got to upload their dealer license, complete a profile and give us a form of payment. And then they can transact and list cars on the marketplace for other dealers to buy and trade. In this environment, because of the supply chain shortages that we just went through and now potential more supply chain issues because of tariffs, dealers know they’ve got to source inventory differently and dealer club organically is growing like a weed. We’ve been busy integrating into our platform.

We just launched the Accu Trade integration. So you can appraise a vehicle and launch it in the wholesale marketplace in real time. But so we just got to get the marketing machine going because dealers that have used dealer club love the model. Importantly, we’re paying the seller to sell where most of the traditional wholesale marketplaces charge both buyers and sellers. We can be disruptive in this and pay sellers to sell in the marketplace and we only charge buy fees.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Interesting. Any willing to share any targets? I know you’ve talked like We

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: signaled Dealer Club will be very modest growth in 2025 because we’re just building the business. But the advantage we have is unlike some competitors today that employ hundreds of people to go around to dealers asking them if they have any inventory they’d like to wholesale or get inspected for wholesale. Because of our Cars.com marketplace, we see aging of inventory in real time and are actually predicting which cars have low to no propensity to retail. So now through dealer club, can actually go to dealerships and say these four cars have low to no propensity to retail at current price. You either can lower the price or you can get rid of them in our wholesale market.

And so we’re going to be able to do this in a very low cost disruptive way without having to employ hundreds of inspectors running all over the country.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Got it. So we can see more contributions starting ’26.

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: ’20 ’20 ’6 we think will be an inflection point and we’ll give updates to investors throughout the year. But again, we’re in the first inning here and the organic adoption has been incredible.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Got it. Just to like sum up a lot of the conversation, you’ve had this period of a little choppy revenue growth over the last few quarters. It looks like it’s going be a little choppy like in the near term. It also seems like we’re getting closer to like an inflection at some point. Do you feel the same way internally?

Do you feel like things are moving the right direction and we’re just waiting for that inflection to occur in a dealer club, Accu Trade, the website renegotiations, things like that. When should investors start to see like a meaningful inflection

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: in the dealer business changes quick. I mean, can tell you NADA this year, which is the big dealer conference was very sparsely attended because dealers were a little bit panicked about where the market was going to go and so they weren’t traveling.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: And the snowstorm.

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: Yeah, well, New Orleans snowstorm is not too extreme coming from Chicago. But I’m headed to Baltimore tomorrow and then the conference is oversold. Dealers know that it’s time to get back to work and get innovation. So the fact that they’re already oversold for this conference tomorrow, I’m excited to go there and speak. Like dealer behavior changes quick and we’re seeing a lot of green shoots going into this year.

Again, Q2 is also following suit. So we’re feeling very front footed about where the market is headed this year. I think it’s going to be a good year in automotive despite a lot of headline noise around tariffs.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Understood. That’s encouraging. Just wanted to check-in once more. Anyone in the audience has a question? No.

Maybe one last one. If you have time, we can do one more. I wanted to touch a little bit on capital allocation. You had a healthy level of buyback in the first quarter. I would say it’s higher than what it’s a higher run rate than what your full year guidance implies.

The stock is trading at four times EBITDA multiples. What’s the help us walk us through like what’s the priority here on capital allocation? Could we see you be a little more aggressive on the buyback just given not just like the capacity you have or the leverage you have on the balance sheet or the flexibility on the balance sheet, but just given the fact that we’re nearing this potential inflection in the business later this year or next year?

Sonya, CFO, Cars.com: Yeah, I mean we’re definitely leaning into share buybacks more this year. I think we tried to indicate that in providing an actual concrete range, dollar range. And you’ve rightly kind of pointed out, we we did 22,000,000 in q one. So if you annualize that out or run rate it out, we’re getting close to, you know, 90, a hundred million dollars at that at that pace. And at current valuations, kind of where where we’re trading, you know, it is it is it is a highly highly attractive purchase in our in our opinion.

So I think you’ll continue to see us be be opportunistic on on that front.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: Got it. Your share price is lower than what you bought in 1Q average I would assume.

Sonya, CFO, Cars.com: Yes. Today

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: it’s a

Alex Wetter, Cars.com: little bit better.

Rajat Gupta, Automotive Equity Research, JPMorgan: But yeah, okay. Got it. No, great. I think that’s a good way to end. Thanks Alex Sonia for the time here and thanks for coming.

Thank you.

Sonya, CFO, Cars.com: Thank you. Thank you.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.