As a rental fleet manager, there is nothing more important to your success than ensuring they take care of their number one asset: Their cars. Fleet managers have to protect the value of their fleet by monitoring its value regularly. Doing so can be a challenge. After all, numerous factors go into determining the value of a car, creating a situation in which an ever-changing landscape can alter the financial health of your business.
What specific tools do you need to protect your car’s value? How can you work to ensure best you are incorporating these tools into your business model?
Why a Technology-Based Solution Is Important
When determining your fleet’s value, a hand-written solution based on a series of guesses isn’t enough, and it hasn’t been for years. Internal and external factors can majorly impact your car’s value. As such, you need a tool to constantly monitor and incorporate these issues to give you the best and most accurate perspective on your car’s value.
Furthermore, your information must be digitally based to ensure your entire team can access it. One person shouldn’t be the only one with access to the information on the value of your cars. That information has to be accessible to all authorized members of your team, as well as a corporate office. Indeed, this widespread access is largely considered necessary for professional fleet management.
Automated Checking
Here’s the truth: You are busier than ever. As a rental fleet manager, you must manage employees, deal with customers, book reservations, and engage in countless other operations that take away from your daily attention. The massive demands on your team require you to use a system that updates automatically without your input. Your system should be able to operate as independently as possible. This means it needs to update the car’s value based on miles driven, location, and overall vehicle health.
More to the point, you can’t reasonably be expected to understand how a supply chain issue in China can hurt or help your car’s value. As such, your automated system has to deal with external factors — like supply chain issues or inflation — that may impact the value of your car. This automation can also enhance the accuracy of your fleet’s valuation, provided that the data it pulls from is reputable and informed by well-researched algorithms.
Daily Updates
The rental car world moves extremely fast, and a car can lose thousands in value overnight. An abrupt change in the value of a car — for any reason — may have a major impact on the value of your fleet. In these instances, days or hours count.
As such, your system has to update regularly, preferably daily. By frequently updating the potential value of your car, you can have the most accurate information in front of you. This data can enable your business to make a nearly instant decision about when to buy or sell a car. In times like this, car inventory remains a challenge. That means available cars may be at a premium, forcing you to make very fast decisions about managing your inventory.
Narrow and Wide Perspectives
On the one hand, you need a system that can tell you the exact value of any car you own. You need to be able to use technology to examine what factors go into the value of each car, then make decisions about that car’s long-term future with your fleet.
At the same time, your valuation tool has to provide a broad approach that shows how much your entire fleet is worth. It should also provide analytics to enable you to see the overall trends of your fleet and what factors may be driving the value of your entire fleet up or down.
Accurate Projections
Knowing what your fleet is worth right now is important. Knowing what it may be worth in the future is necessary for your planning efforts. After all, you will never know when you need to buy, sell, or replace your fleet if you don’t have reliable information on how the value of your fleet will move in the future.
To that end, your rental management fleet needs information on how your vehicle valuation may change. This means you need an automated, active system that can consider personalized and external factors to make educated estimates about how the value of your fleet will change. This information should be automatically imported and updated daily, enabling you to make educated decisions.
The Zubie Difference
At Zubie, we get it: You need the best. Our vehicle valuation tool ensures that you have all the information you need at your fingertips, protecting your fleet and allowing your business to make the best financial decisions. Indeed, when this tool integrates with other Zubie rental solutions, you can ensure that you are using an affordable technology package to take your rental business to the next level.
Ready to learn more? Contact us today to learn how Zubie can help your fleet management operations.