New-vehicle registrations in Arkansas fell 19 percent to 6,418 titles in September, the fifth time this year a month has shown a decline, Cross-Sell of Lexington, Ky., which provides analysis for the auto industry, said Wednesday.
September’s decline compared with the previous September was the second straight year-to-tear drop after a 6.8 percent slide in August.
There are several reasons for the drop-off, said Dennis Jungmeyer, president of the Arkansas Automobile Dealers Association.
September is traditionally a slow month because children are returning to school, Jungmeyer said.
“Attentions are elsewhere,” Jungmeyer said.
And there seems to be a slowdown in demand for new cars or trucks, Jungmeyer said.
“That doesn’t mean at all that we won’t have a robust future, but we may be seeing more of a leveling off in pent up demand,” Jungmeyer said.
There have been consistently strong gains in auto registrations for the past couple of years, said Michael Pakko, chief economist at the Institute for Economic Advancement at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Many months the number of titles were up by double-digit percentages.
“We’re getting back to a more normal market,” Pakko said. “We wouldn’t expect to see huge rates of increase month after month after month. So to see a couple of months down from the previous year, it’s not too terribly concerning.”
Even though titles were down in September, the more representative picture of the auto industry in Arkansas is the total titles issued through September, Pakko said.
Registrations were up 3.6 percent for the first nine months of 2013, with new-vehicle titles totaling 74,131 this year compared with 71,570 through nine months last year.
“That is probably a better indication of the overall state of the market than any one month,” Pakko said. “When you’re looking at year-to-date[totals], it doesn’t necessarily show you which direction the momentum is headed - things might be slowing as you reach the end of the year. But it does give you the direction we’ve been through to this point.”
Nationally, auto sales were off 4.2 percent in September from September 2012, the first monthly drop since June 2011, said Autodata Corp., which does industry research. One factor that contributed to the drop was a quirk in the calendar that lumped Labor Day weekend sales into August totals, Pakko said.
The auto industry is getting into very attractive interest rates and long-term loans for customers, Jungmeyer said. Seven-year loans are not uncommon, Jungmeyer said.
“Pretty soon that’s going to start having an impact on the market,” Jungmeyer said. “It’s great, but you take people out of the market for six or seven years.”
Every category of registrations fell last month. There were 8,910 used cars registered after sales by auto dealers, down 18.6 percent from 10,952 in September last year. An additional 14,143 used vehicles were titled after private-party transactions, down 23 percent from 18,364 used vehicles registered in private-party registrations in September 2012.
Chevrolet was the No. 1 make of vehicle registered in September, with a total of 1,018 or 15.9 percent of the market. Toyota was second with 899 titles in September, a 14 percent market share.
Chevrolet full-sized pickups were the most common model registered last month with 409 units registered, ahead of Ford F-series pickups with 406 titles. About 24 percent of vehicles, or almost one in every four, registered last month was a full-sized pickup.
The number of titles issued in Arkansas doesn’t match vehicle sales each month, unlike most states. That’s because auto buyers in Arkansas are given up to 30 days to register vehicles after buying them. So most of the September registrations were for sales made in August.
Business, Pages 27 on 10/24/2013