Good day, and welcome to the Carvana first quarter 2020 earnings call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mike Levin, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please proceed.
Thank you, Eric. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us on Carvana's first quarter earnings conference call. Please note that this call will simultaneously be webcast on the investor relations section of the company's corporate website at investors.carvana.com. The first quarter shareholder letter is also posted on the IR website. Joining me on the call today are Ernie Garcia, Chief Executive Officer, and Mark Jenkins, Chief Financial Officer. Before we start, I would like to remind you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including, but not limited to Carvana's market opportunities and future financial results that involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here.
A detailed discussion of the material factors that cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements can be found in the Risk Factors section of Carvana's most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. The forward-looking statements and risks in this conference call are based on current expectations as of today, and Carvana assumes no obligation to update or revise them, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise. Unless otherwise noted on today's call, our comparisons are on a year-over-year basis. Our commentary today will include non-GAAP financial measures. Historically, we've used the non-GAAP measure ex-Gift, which excludes the impact of 100,000-Milestone Gift to our employees. Beginning this quarter, that program has concluded and is no longer material to our results. Any metrics for this quarter referenced on the call today will be inclusive of the 100,000-Milestone Gift.
You can find the 100,000-Milestone Gift impacts called out in our reported financials. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics for our reported results can be found in our shareholder letter issued today, a copy of which can be found on our investor relations website. Now, with that said, I'd like to turn the call over to Ernie Garcia. Ernie?
Thank you, Mike, and thanks, everyone, for joining the call. This has been a quarter unlike any we've faced as a company. The onset of the pandemic has led to unprecedented changes in our health and behavior, which in turn have significant and currently unquantifiable impact on the economy. Accordingly, we will spend less time than we normally would discussing the specifics of the quarter. I will briefly hit on where we sit today and then spend more time discussing the ways we've reacted so far and the ways we are thinking about and planning for the future. We began to see significant reductions in demand in the back half of March, With a sales trough in early April at approximately 30% reduction in sales year-over-year.
From there, we have consistently improved week after week, with sales in the most recent weeks being up about 20%-30% year-over-year. It is difficult to get clear visibility into exactly how the industry performed over the last several weeks, every indication is that Carvana has outperformed the industry quite significantly and grown our market share accordingly over this period. We believe part of this outperformance has been driven by transitory factors, that part of it has been driven by customer preference changes due to the pandemic. We don't yet know how persistent these customer preference changes will be, we are optimistic. Viewed through a medium-term lens, we believe customer behavior shifts are likely to accelerate our progress. Let's turn to how we've reacted so far. In early March, it became clear that we were dealing with a very significant event.
At that time, we determined that we were fighting a battle with two fronts, Health and Financial Health. Our first priority is the Health front, keeping our team and our customers safe. Along those lines, we have enacted work from home for corporate and customer care teams, have reconfigured our inspection centers and field locations to support social distancing, adopted CDC guidance, and implemented a Touchless Delivery experience for our customers. The second front is the Financial Health front. Here, we've had three primary goals, to align expenses with this new environment, to manage our risks and uncertainties thoughtfully, and to ensure we preserve and continue to progress in those areas that are most important to our long-term success. We came into the pandemic expecting our biggest absolute unit growth year yet and with the business positioned to deliver on those goals.
Demand shock we started to see in mid-March has obviously necessitated some significant and difficult changes. In order to align expenses with the new environment, we eliminated overtime and travel budgets, reduced hours, and paused hiring. Another important component of our strategy for managing through this has been to carefully manage our risks and uncertainties. We view the most important areas of uncertainty during this period to be industry demand levels, the credit and capital market environment, and inventory values. In an effort to manage demand uncertainty, we moved quickly on expense management, rolled out new commercials tailored to this environment, implemented a 90-day payment deferment promotion for our customers, and designed our expense reduction initiatives to be impactful while also being easily reversible to enable us to adapt to different demand scenarios. We've also been active in managing our credit and capital markets risk.
In late March, we tightened credit significantly on the loans generated on our platform. In addition, we upsized our forward flow purchase agreement with Ally to $2 billion and broadened the set of customers covered under the agreement, and we completed a $600 million common stock offering to fortify our balance sheet. We view inventory values as another area that we want to be purposeful about managing. We ceased all purchases except for customer trade-ins in late March, which in combination with our outperformance and sales relative to the industry, have reduced our total inventory by about 30% in just five weeks since the quarter ended. This significantly reduces our exposure to inventory purchased prior to the pandemic.
As we bring down expenses and manage our risks, we are also continuing to extend our leadership in the areas that are most important to our long-term success. The single most important is the quality of our customer experiences. Our customer experiences have three primary drivers, our culture, our technology, and our supply chain. We are continuing to invest in our technology to make buying a car even easier, more fun, and safe for our customers. This, in turn, enables a different, more efficient supply chain than has traditionally existed in automotive retail. We're also continuing to fill our real estate pipeline while holding off on growth CapEx, so we are prepared to return to rapid growth when the time is right. Culture is at the top of the list of drivers of our long-term success. It's at the top for a reason.
Everything we do, all the things that come together to deliver incredible customer experiences, are done by our people. People and the relationships and processes that connect them are the great fundamental in any business. An environment like this is a test for any culture. You learn more about people and more about a culture during these moments of intense, direct pressure. Before I tell you what we have learned so far, I want to tell you what we hope. In mid-March, we set a goal that we would come out of this stronger, that we, our entire team across the country, would look back on this time as a period that we came together. To achieve this, we decided to use our values, most extensively our value, We're All In This Together, as the lens for making tough decisions. We came into the pandemic poised for tremendous growth.
This obviously made aligning expenses with this environment difficult. The only way we could achieve it was to significantly reduce hours for thousands of people across the company. This was undoubtedly the hardest and most painful decision any members of our management team have ever had to make. It's an unfortunate reality that the right decision for Carvana, given all of our goals, was to reduce the hours of the operators that work so hard every day to deliver the customer experiences that define us. That reality did not align with our value, We're All in This Together. We set up a fund where people across the company could volunteer a portion of their salaries that would go into this fund and offset lost wages for those who lost hours.
We had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people across the company voluntarily contribute their wages into the fund, including the Board of Directors and the Executive Team that all contributed 100% of their salaries during this time. I think there is no clearer expression of our culture than this. In fact, many of the contributions came from people who lost hours themselves, but who knew others needed a hand more than they did. Really think about that for a minute. In a time of fear and uncertainty, these people, who are dealing themselves with reduced income, decided to give more. They did it because they're incredible people, they did it because they're part of something, and they did it because we're all in this together.
The fact that they did it, that so many did it, is something that I think the entire team at Carvana should be tremendously proud of. This is the strongest and fondest memory I'll take from all this. Difficulty rarely leaves things as they were. It tears groups apart or it brings them together. We've been brought together. There are undoubtedly more challenges that lie in front of us, but we head into those challenges confidently because of the people standing beside us. Mark?
Thank you, Ernie, and thank you all for joining us today. Q1 was a strong quarter for Carvana in light of the extreme disruption to our nation, industry, and company brought on by COVID-19. Retail units sold in Q1 totaled 52,427, an increase of 43%. Total revenue was $1.1 billion, an increase of 45%. Both of these numbers reflect significant gains in market share, which are continuing through April and the first week of May. Total gross profit per unit was $2,640 in Q1, an increase of $232. Our growth in GPU was driven by strong retail GPU, which increased $299 to $1,581, our highest ever, driven primarily by buying cars from customers. Wholesale GPU was $23, a reduction of $60, primarily impacted by declines in industry-wide wholesale prices in late Q1. Other GPU was $1,036, a decrease of $8.
This included a $97 reduction in finance GPU to $528, offset by an $89 increase in ancillary products to $508. In March, we completed our first nonprime securitization and sold our prime loans that were originally intended to be part of our two-shelf securitization program under our existing forward flow agreement. While lower than recent quarters, we believe our Q1 finance GPU demonstrates the resilience of our finance platform during an extremely volatile period. EBITDA margin was -12.6% in Q1, a decrease from -7.8%. EBITDA margin was significantly impacted by the reduction in demand brought on by COVID-19 during a key selling period in March. In addition, EBITDA margin in Q1 was impacted by 2.4 percentage points or $26 million due to COVID-19 related non-cash adjustments to asset carrying values that we do not expect to recur in future periods.
In late Q1, we took several measures to better align our expenses with customer demand. Following the spread of COVID-19, we immediately paused discretionary growth investments, including new hiring, travel, and new facilities and IT investments. We also made the prudent but difficult decisions to rebalance staffing and marketing to better match demand. Although we made these decisions early and quickly, lower volume outweighed the expense reductions and led to a 4.6% increase in SG&A as a percent of revenue. In light of the uncertainty generated by COVID-19, our expansion strategy has shifted to one that prioritizes risk reduction while also ensuring that we are prepared for growth when a normalized environment returns. We have paused acquiring new inspection and reconditioning centers and vending machines. However, we are continuing construction on IRCs that were already in process and that have existing sale leaseback agreements in place.
Additionally, due to the positive customer response to our Touchless Delivery offering, we plan to open many smaller markets that can be served by our existing logistics and delivery infrastructure with limited incremental investment. Following quarter end, we completed a registered direct offering of 13.3 million shares, raising $600 million and bringing our total liquidity resources on April 1st to over $1 billion. These liquidity resources provide us with significant flexibility to operate our business under a wide range of operating and macroeconomic scenarios. We upsized and extended our existing forward flow agreement with Ally, providing additional flexibility to serve our customers. We expect 169 million on a fully exchange basis, shares in Q2. We are focused on positioning the business to be lean and flexible as we march toward our long-term goals. Thank you for your attention. We will now take questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch-tone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If your question has been answered and you wish to withdraw your question, please press star then two. In the interest of time, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you wish to ask another question, you may do so by reentering the queue. We will pause for one moment to assemble our roster. Our first question today will come from Zach Fadem of Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.
Hi. I'm curious if you could talk us through the inventory management in a little more detail, and how you went about the $500 per unit inventory charge. Curious if you could talk us through whether the environment has evolved into Q2, and if you see any reasons to believe the GPU environment can improve from here.
Sure. I think, in general, the way that we assess our inventory and determine its carrying value is a function of basically looking at what our pricing is, and then what that means for what we're likely to receive in proceeds relative to the value that we acquired inventory at. That's kind of a standard accounting framework for determining that. That's how we go about assessing our inventory charges reserve level. In terms of how the situation has evolved, I think it's been a very dynamic situation in terms of what's going on with inventory pricing. We saw right when the pandemic hit, basically volume kind of dried up in the wholesale markets pretty significantly, dropped down to probably 20% of normal levels. It stayed down at those levels for a while.
We've seen it more recently climb up to closer to 50% of its probably pre-pandemic expected levels over the last couple of weeks, that's been kind of a linear march up. We've also seen wholesale pricing kind of move up a little bit over the last couple of weeks as well. We've seen sell-through rates, which is the likelihood that any given car that's going through auction is actually sold to a buyer, also go up a little bit. I think there's been some signs of stability there, but I think we still remain in a highly uncertain environment as it relates to vehicle values. That's something that we're assessing very carefully and watching. On the retail side, there's definitely been much more stability in pricing, for probably a number of technical reasons, but we've seen much more stability there.
I think what we've attempted to do by stopping our purchases and kind of trying to push our inventory values or, excuse me, inventory levels down as quickly as we could, is just make sure that we minimize our exposure to all that inventory that was purchased in the pre-pandemic world, as we view that as a potentially large exposure. I do think we've had incredible progress there, marching that down 30% since the end of March. I think it's something that we're really excited about. I do think that's something that we're paying very close attention to.
Got it. Thanks, Ernie. I wanted to talk about the 90-day no payment offer. Curious if all customers qualify for that, and maybe you could walk through the impact there in terms of top line. I was also curious how that works in terms of financing those receivables and if there's a delayed impact there on those transactions.
Sure. On the 90-day promo, that is something that there are qualifying requirements for that. For many of the customers that are then being sold through our forward flow purchase agreement, most of them are qualifying, and then they have an option to elect into that or not. In the loans that are not being sold through our forward flow purchase agreement, which is approximately a third of the loans that we're originating today, a significant minority of the customers are qualifying for that. We do believe that's probably had a positive impact. I think quantifying it precisely is difficult in light of the many, many different things that we've done over the last several weeks to ensure that we're putting our best foot forward in front of our customers. I think that's been one of many steps that we've taken.
The impact to GPU flows through finance GPU. In the case of being sold to Ally, that's something that is predetermined. We worked with them, given their experience with these kinds of offerings to customers in the past, to size that appropriately. That's how that's all been working.
Got it. Appreciate the time, guys.
Thank you.
Our next question will come from Colin Sebastian with Baird. Please proceed with your question.
Great. Thanks. Hope everyone there is safe and healthy. I guess one follow-up on the April trends. How much have you been able to take advantage of some of the ad pricing deflation? How much has that been a catalyst for your ability to connect with potential buyers? Looking beyond the current environment, curious on what you think might be liquidity needs incrementally for the balance of the year, in different scenarios around the economy. In general, is Myron changing any of your strategic priorities, whether that's related to market expansions and vending machines, things like that? Thank you.
Sure. There's clearly been a reduction in advertising costs, and I think there's also clearly been an increase in impressions. More consumers are consuming more media than they historically have. I think that cost per impressions have fallen pretty dramatically. I think that impact is at least directionally offset by the fact that consumers are also purchasing less in this environment, across the economy, and up until several weeks ago, especially in automotive. We've clearly seen price reductions. Those price reductions have continued over the last month or so, and so I don't think we know exactly where that's going to go, but there's clearly been reductions in the cost to get your message in front of consumers. That's something that we'll continue to monitor very carefully going forward.
Sure. On the liquidity question, I would start with the fact that we had about $1 billion, actually a little bit more than $1 billion in total liquidity resources as of April 1st, following close of our $600 million offering. That gives us ample resources to operate in even deep stress scenarios. We think those deep stress scenarios are looking less likely than perhaps they were three or four weeks ago. We have a lot of flexibility, even in deep stress scenarios, to operate flexibly. Then, of course, in upside scenarios, have a lot of flexibility there as well. I think some of the drivers of that flexibility have been the operational changes that we have made to respond to the COVID-19 environment.
Those include limiting CapEx, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, to focus primarily on inspection and reconditioning centers where we already have sale leaseback agreements in place. From an operating expense perspective, obviously taking a number of steps to match our operating expenses to the current demand environment. The combination of those things, which really started to be put into action in the second half of March. We're playing out those plans through the second half of March and then through April, leave us feeling really good about our liquidity position, even in deep stress scenarios because of those levers that we have in the business.
Thank you.
Our next question will come from Lee Krowl of B. Riley FBR. Please proceed with your question.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions. One, wanted to just, a high level demand picture thoughts, as we have arguably lower air travel coming over the holiday season of summer, thoughts on implied demand from more vehicles on the road, more miles driven, also just the thoughts around the shift in the tax date from April to July?
On your first point, I think there's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of questions about what this new world means, both in the immediate term and in the longer term. I think what we'd say, there's a lot of different data sources out there you can read about expectations that personal ownership actually accelerates as a result of all this and increases because more people don't want to take public transportation, or choose not to partake in ride sharing. There are probably other effects like those outlined, where people are traveling less in the air and taking road trips instead. I think all of those things are possible. They're very, very hard to size and they're very hard to rely on. I think what we are most excited about is first and foremost, the market share that we've always been planning to go after and take over time.
We've been growing our business very quickly prior to this as a result of our extremely differentiated offering, and all the customer preferences that that serves. I think that in this new world, we now know the direction of a new customer preference, which is a preference for safety and minimizing unnecessary impact with other people that customers don't know as well. We know that that's likely to push demand in our direction and aid our goals of increasing our market share. We don't know how strong that impact will be. We don't know how persistent it will be. It's pretty clear that's a directional impact, and we think that overall, when assessing Carvana, what matters most is our market share gains. The market around us is extraordinarily large, and we're still very, very small compared to that market. Then your second question, would you mind clarifying?
I'm not sure I totally understood the tax date.
Yes.
Okay, perfect. The tax date? Do you mean tax refunds that showed up a week or so later this year? Is that what you're referencing?
Correct.
Perhaps you're referencing the change in the filing deadline from April 15 to July 15th. I think that could have some impact on customer behavior. We did see some tax refunds certainly come through before COVID-19 really came into force in the U.S. in Q1. I think that any impacts from the shift in the deadline from April to July, I would think would just be very much melded in with the probably much bigger impacts that come from shelter in place orders being lifted, consumers starting to get out there and spend again. I think it'll be hard to disentangle those impacts. I actually think the COVID impacts will win out over any impacts related to the tax deadline shift.
Got it. Thanks for taking my questions.
Our next question will come from Brian Nagel of Oppenheimer. Please proceed with your question.
Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. The first question, I guess it's more geared towards Mark, just on the financials. Clearly, as you talked about a lot, significant disruption here in the first quarter. As we look at that quarter and some of the maybe areas of cost, are there larger call-outs that we should be thinking about as we try to get to what would've been a more normalized earnings trajectory for Carvana, either positives or negatives callouts as the business had to flex in the second half of the month of March?
Sure, yeah. The largest expense callout is the adjustment to asset carrying values totaling about $26 million that I alluded to in my prepared remarks. That was really split between two things. The larger portion was related to adjustments in the valuation of finance receivable related assets that we hold on our balance sheet. Obviously, the end of March, which is when we do that evaluation, was a very turbulent time in financial markets. We took an adjustment to some finance receivable related assets that we hold on the balance sheet. The second-largest category was, we did observe toward the end of March significant changes in the wholesale trading prices of used vehicles. We also saw a significant reduction in demand, which changed some of our expectations about the number of days to sale that we expected to experience in our retail business.
When taking both of those things into consideration, we made some adjustments to our inventory value, and the sum of those totaled $26 million. That was a very large impact on the expense side. In terms of SG&A, I think the two biggest places where we saw an impact were really in advertising per car sold and compensation and benefits per car sold. The way to think about both of those is Q4 and then early Q1, or the first couple months of Q1, is a big investment period for us as we invest in staffing and invest in marketing in preparation for one of the busiest times of the year, which is tax season. This year, we made those significant investments, but then demand in March was nothing like what we anticipated for obvious reasons related to COVID-19.
We certainly saw elevated levels of compensation and benefits and advertising expense per unit relative to what we otherwise would've expected. We also saw elevated levels on a per unit basis in the other expense line items, but those were the biggest two.
That's very helpful. I appreciate it. Then my follow-up question, as we look at the rebounding sales you called out here in Q2, so congrats on that. The question I have is, again, I understand it's fluid right now, are you seeing just is this more of a return to normal, your normal customers coming back? Is there some type of shift within the demand that's returning? The second is it ramping? Is it continuing to ramp here, or is it basically just reset back a bit?
I think there are many different data sources that you can look at to try to get a sense of what sales look like across the industry in April and in the last several weeks. I think many of those datasets circle around the same answers but don't precisely agree. For used car sales, I think they range from estimates of the entire month of April being down 55%, give or take, to as little as 45%. In more recent weeks, depending on what dataset you're looking at, maybe down 35% to maybe only down 20%-25%. I think those would be the estimates of what's happening in the industry over the last several weeks. In the month of April, as we said, we troughed at approximately down 30% year-over-year early in the month.
We came back very strongly to end of the month, barely down year-over-year at all. In most recent weeks, have been up 20%-30% and have seen pretty healthy, steady, consistent growth over the last several weeks. It's clear that we are outperforming the industry based on all the data we look at. When we look at the demographics of our customers and kind of try to get a sense of where that share may be coming from, our demographics were pretty broad-based before, and so there are maybe some very subtle differences that we're able to observe, but I don't think any of those differences are strong enough to where we have certainty that there's real information in them or certainly that they would be worth calling out on this call.
I think in general, it feels like it's been a broad-based improvement. There have been surveys out, there's 1 million of these surveys out, you can look at many different ones. One that came out several weeks ago that was put out by CarGurus. Prior to the pandemic, one of the questions they asked customers was something along the lines of, would you consider buying a car online? At that time, something like 32% of customers raised their hand and said, "I would consider doing that." Several weeks ago, which was still relatively early in all this, that number had jumped up to about 61% of customers said they would consider buying a car online. We do think that in this new environment, we have a very, very desirable offering.
We think that bodes well for the medium term, but undoubtedly, the market, the entire industry took a big, surprising, unexpected hit in late March and April. I think now we're marching back pretty steadily. I think if you take these lines and extend them out, I think they suggest pretty exciting next couple of quarters in several respects. We think that there's still a fair amount of risk left. We still don't have a permanent solution for the virus. We still don't really know the degree of the economic impacts. I think there's a number of micro impacts in automotive that we're watching very carefully. We called out our prepared remarks. I think we are enthusiastic about the response that we've seen, and most importantly, honestly, the way that the company's responded to all of this.
I think we're still trying to make sure that we're looking at the future through the lens of different scenarios and making sure the business is flexible and able to adapt quickly to different scenarios as we're not sure exactly what to expect out of the next several months.
Got it. That's very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you.
Our next question will come from Sharon Zackfia of William Blair. Please proceed with your question.
Hi, good afternoon.
Sure
give us any perspective on what retail GPU might have looked like for you in April as you were kind of unwinding the inventory? Secondarily on the finance business, I mean, obviously the end of March was really rough. How do we think about finance revenue per car kind of going into the second quarter and the rest of the year? Should that normalize back towards levels that look more similar to last year? Is there something else that we should consider as kind of hampering that?
Sure. Let's start with retail GPU. I think first and foremost, I think we are very pleased with retail GPU. I think absent coronavirus, it would've been higher still. We view that as a very healthy number. It was marginally impacted by our choice to stop purchasing inventory in late March. Something that's kind of always happening in our retail GPU and flowing through our financial statements is that you're constantly buying cars, and then as you buy those cars, those cars get reconditioned at the Inspection Reconditioning Centers. They get put on the site, and then they have some probability of being sold on any given day. The cars that you put up that are sold quickly tend to have higher margins, and the cars that take longer to sell tend to have lower margins.
When you stop buying cars, you're kind of freezing your inventory in time, and that inventory starts to age out. All else constant, the average margin that you observe flowing through the income statement is going to drop because time is moving and cars depreciate with respect to time. I do think that probably had a marginal impact. That will likely be a larger impact in the second quarter than it was in the first. If you just kind of run a very simple mental model of saying you don't buy any cars in the quarter, then on average, your days of sale would go up by approximately 45 days if you're selling those cars throughout a 90-day quarter. You can kind of do the math on what would happen there.
We are starting to now turn purchases back on, given both the stability that we're observing in the wholesale markets, or at least the relative stability that we're observing in the wholesale markets, and the strong demand that we're seeing, as well as the fact that we've now brought our inventory down and reduced our exposure there considerably. That will provide an offset to just that depreciation. That is an impact in Q1 and is likely to be a larger impact in Q2. As we think about finance revenue per car, I think I'll start with we're extremely pleased with how our finance platform held up in this environment. We went and did our first nonprime securitization in the quarter. We did that in an extremely turbulent market. We did get that done before markets shut for a short period of time.
We did not get the premium that we were expecting or likely would have gotten in previous periods. We still got a very solid premium, and we're pleased with that. We pivoted as securitization markets closed for a short period of time. Instead of doing a prime securitization, we sold those loans through our forward flow purchase agreement as would be expected in this new environment when kind of yields are moving up and spreads are moving up and loss expectations are moving up. The premium we received was less than we might have otherwise received. It was, again, a premium that we were pleased with. To me, I would view that as actually an excellent test and a sign of resiliency of the finance platform.
We certainly wish it would've been as high a number as it was in Q4 and always do and believe that it will continue to go up even from the Q4 levels. I also think that that number represents a very strong number compared to what the traditional dealership model gets. It also represents a relatively small decrease relative to what many finance models that would take charges to credit being held on balance sheet would take. I think to us, that's a very resilient number that we think is a great moment for the finance platform to demonstrate its strength, not only in a positive scenario, but also in a downside case.
Thank you. Our next question will come from Armintas Sinkevicius of Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.
Great. Thank you for taking the question. I'm just looking at SG&A, other is defined as IT expenses, corporate occupancy, professional services, insurance, limited warranty, title registration. I'm assuming that on their own, none of these items are really greater than $8 million for market occupancy. This line item's been a bit of a black box here. I was hoping that you could shed some color on what goes into other, why it's doubled over the past year. Is it capitalized software or there's something else driving that growth higher?
Sure. Yes, we hit this a little bit on the last call as well. I think there's basically three big buckets that you can think of as being in other. The first is technology, the second is corporate, and then there's also some transactional expenses in there. I think in terms of the way that that's grown over the last year or so, we definitely have been investing in all of those areas. One of the big sources of investment in 2019 was essentially building almost from scratch this business of buying cars from customers.
Yep.
That definitely impacted all three of those big buckets that I just walked through. That was a major innovation and a major add to the business in 2019. It was a big driver of all the line items, but certainly the other SG&A line item as well. That's also true in Q1. All of those things that I just walked through are certainly the expenses that we'd be bearing in Q1. Other SG&A per car sold actually was up a little bit in Q1 despite a pretty significant drop-off in demand in March. Those are the major buckets. That's certainly a bucket that we expect to lever significantly over time as we march toward our long-term model.
Okay. Just for the first quarter, every single line item in SG&A was higher than the prior quarter. You mentioned some of the costs related to advertising and comp and benefits. Looking ahead to the second quarter, what levers are you pulling here to manage to what you see as an appropriate burn rate for the company? Any of these line items that we should be thinking of trending lower sequentially into the second quarter?
Sure. Yeah. We certainly expect declines on a per car sold basis in those SG&A line items. I think where does that come from? I think a big part of the expected decline on a per unit basis is the response that we've taken to COVID-19. In Q1, we were in a period where we were significantly investing. March is often one of our best, if not our best month of the year, which is common in the used car industry. We were investing really significantly in advance of expected busy season. When that busy season didn't materialize, obviously that had a significant impact on our expenses per car sold that were ultimately realized in the quarter. Of course, we do expect, as I alluded to, through the actions that we've taken for per car sold expenses to decline in Q2.
Our next question will come from Ron Josey of JMP Securities. Please proceed with your question.
Hi, this is Andrew Boone for Ron. Thanks for taking our question. With April sales rebounding to that +20%- 30% level that you guys talked about, understood things are yet to kind of normalize. With significant share gains that you guys are seeing, can you talk about kind of with a recapitalized balance sheet why you guys aren't leaning into advertising more? Is there a change in ROI or is there something else there? Secondly, just kind of a big-picture question. Ernie, the way that you've built this business is really a fixed-cost model. As you go through something like this, does this make you want to push more cost to a variable model or do you think about that any differently? Thank you.
Sure. What I would say is I think, I would start with we're extraordinarily happy with the way the last several weeks have gone from a demand perspective. Being up 20%-30% year-over-year after being down 30% year-over-year just several weeks before is a pretty dramatic reversal and has us back to pretty significant levels of sales. I think as we look forward, what we're trying to do is we're trying to balance the uncertainty that remains in the industry and the economy and with the virus with the upside potential that we clearly see. I think that has us monitoring many different things very closely. We've talked a little bit about how we're monitoring the inventory prices in markets. We're definitely monitoring the credit markets. We're clearly very closely following demand that we're seeing on our website.
We're paying close attention to marketing costs. We're trying to get a good handle on all of those things. We're trying to make sure that we move forward in ways that we believe allow us to take advantage of the situation when it's positive, but also ensure that we cut off the worst downside cases if things do turn a little bit negative. I think that's an equation that we're trying to balance really carefully because we do feel like while trends are very positive, it is still entirely possible that we're in the somewhat early stages of this, and we want to make sure that we get a good look at it before we make sweeping moves.
We will be monitoring all that, and we have been making changes very rapidly, and I would anticipate that we will continue to make changes very rapidly as information becomes available.
I think this business is designed to swap variable costs for fixed costs relative to the traditional model. We think that is absolutely the right move, and in no way, shape, or form would we want to change that at all. I think the degree to which that ends up being the right choice is a function of the size of the business that you believe you can ultimately build. Prior to this, we believed that we could build a business that would sell two million plus cars per year, and that would lead to us being the largest, most profitable automotive retailer. I don't think we have any information that would cause us to question that in any way, shape, or form.
I think if anything, the information that's changed would potentially make us more optimistic about the speed to getting there or even the possible ultimate upside. I think we feel very good about the way we've designed the business and think it positions us incredibly well to continue growth. I think we've also demonstrated a lot of flexibility in the model. This point is right, that we've built a business that is set up to have higher fixed costs and lower variable costs. That's an incredible setup when you're growing very quickly and when you're looking at the long term at these large market shares. That's a really tough setup when you're looking at a discontinuous demand shock like the one that we just saw over the last five or six weeks.
I think the business also demonstrated its flexibility and our ability to pull levers and kind of size it down and pull in our wings and adjust quickly to a lower demand environment. It's shown its ability to spring back up over the last couple of weeks. We feel great about the business that we've designed, and think if anything, the future's brighter.
Thank you.
Our next question will come from Rajat Gupta of JP Morgan. Please proceed with your question.
Hey, good evening. Thanks for taking my questions. Just had a couple of follow-ups on the finance GPU questions. Could you help break out what the difference in finance GPU was in one queue between the forward flow and the non-prime ABS deal? Related to that, moving into the second quarter and beyond, is the plan still to monetize a majority of the loans through Ally in the near term, or have you seen any change in the environment in the ABS markets that you might want to tap into in the second quarter as well? Do we expect a similar kind of premium in the second quarter as well overall as you saw in the first quarter? I have a follow-up. Thanks.
Sure. At a high level, what I would say is, on both pools, we received a premium. On both pools, it was less than we would have anticipated prior. We historically haven't kind of dove in at greater detail than that, and so I don't think we'll start now. Generally speaking, those pools, we tend to monetize it at somewhat similar levels. Looking forward, first, I want to start with Ally. I think Ally's been an absolutely tremendous partner for us and reacted very quickly with us when we saw the difficulty that was emerging in the economy generally and as a result of the pandemic and also in credit markets, and worked with us to upsize that forward flow purchase agreement to a $2 billion agreement.
As you'd expect in this environment, they're going to do better financially on those loans they originate, as they should, A, because of the environment, and B, because they were there for us to make sure that we could massage out that risk, which we're extraordinarily grateful for. They will do better, and that will, all else constant, impact finance GPU over the coming quarter or two. That said, the market also tends to react and interest rates move, and the interest rates that we're able to charge in the market may offset that. It's hard to know exactly what's going to happen there. Looking into Q2 and trying to figure out exactly what finance GPU is going to be is definitely difficult. I don't think we have perfect clarity there in any way, shape, or form. We wouldn't anticipate it.
Our best guess, with fairly wide uncertainty bars around it, would be for it to be somewhat similar to what it was in Q1. The securitization markets have begun to open up again. There have been several deals done over the last couple of weeks, and there's anticipated to be many more deals done over the next several weeks. I do think those markets are opening up, and the ability to monetize receivables seems to be improving. I think there are reasons to be optimistic there. I also think that remains an area where it's wise to kind of expect the unexpected there and plan for a little bit of uncertainty. I don't think we want to give you precise expectations for what that'll look like in Q2.
That's a great color. Thanks for that. Just more of a housekeeping question. The other expense line item that was up materially, I believe some of that was due to the loss on the beneficial interest in securitization. Was there anything else that went into that was material to call out? Is that part of the $26 million non-cash that you talked about as well? Just to clarify that. Thanks.
Yes. That $17 million is part of the $26 million. That's the larger portion that I was referencing earlier. That $17 million is related to these finance receivable-related assets. The biggest part of that is retained beneficial interests in securitizations, and then there's a portion that's another finance receivable asset bonus payment, essentially.
Got it. Basically, $9 million was the impact on just the retail and wholesale GPU. The rest is mainly finance-driven.
That's correct.
Sorry. Okay, thanks for the clarification and good luck.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Rick Nelson of Stephens. Please proceed with your question.
Thanks. Good afternoon. I'd like to follow up on this dramatic shift from sales declines early in April to the increases that you're seeing later in the month. Seems much more dramatic than what's happening in the overall used car business. Curious about GPU, were there changes there, stimulus checks, did that impact the 90-day promotion, how you think that impacted?
Sure. I think those are among the things that are difficult to disentangle. I think we saw a rapid demand shock that pushed sales down. I think from there, we implemented the 90-day promotion. We've put out different marketing materials that are tailored to this moment to reach out to customers through these less expensive marketing channels. The stimulus checks were received by customers. There seems to be general recovery happening in the market. I believe there are a number of forces that are flowing through there that are difficult to separate. I think what we're excited about is it does seem clear that we are outperforming the market generally, in terms of the severity of the decrease in sales and in terms of the speed with which sales are climbing back.
I think we're excited by that, and we think that that speaks to these shifts in customer preferences in our direction. Trying to disentangle the other impacts, I think is too difficult for us to want to take a swing at that.
Got you. I'm also curious, do you reduce retail inventory exclusively through the website? Do you use the wholesale channel to liquidate, auctions or other wholesalers?
Through the website.
All through the website. Great. Thanks, and good luck.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Nick Jones of Citi. Please proceed with your question.
Hey, thanks for taking my question. I guess one on the competition. You pointed to the CarGurus survey. In Ally, that's a marketing tool for them to try to get other dealers to start delivering. Have you changed your views on what competition's going to do to kind of the new way to sell cars? It seems like you might have more entrants now after this. Do you have any updated thoughts there? Thanks.
Sure. What I would say is I think across the economy, across different retail verticals, and certainly in automotive, I think there seems to be a broadly held expectation that e-commerce will be a relative outperformer during this time and coming out of this time. I don't think that that's a secret. I think the survey that came from CarGurus is one of many surveys like it, as this is clearly a very topical point at the moment. I think what we would start with is we think that that's really, really good news. I think the first order impact of consumers wanting to transact in the way that we've specialized for the last seven years is a big positive.
I do think that to some degree, you do need to then think through the second order effect, which is others being more inclined to try to build similar offerings to the offering that we've built. I think our expectation would be that that will likely happen. I think that was already happening to some degree, and our expectation would be that that will likely happen debatably more now. I think it's important to look at the market generally. This is a market with tens of thousands of dealers where the top 100 players have on the order of a 7% or 8% market share. It's an enormously fragmented market. It's a very large market, depending on your definition, on the order of a trillion-dollar market. It's really, really large.
We think that that also points in the direction of not becoming overly competition-focused because there are just so many small competitors as opposed to one or two large competitors, as there generally are in many of these other industries. We've spent the last seven years investing in the technology that gives customers a great experience online and investing in the supply chain that that great online experience unlocks that delivers selection to customers and building a brand for doing exactly that. Building an e-commerce business is an expensive undertaking. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of money. This is clearly visible across industries. It's hard. It's a hard thing to do. I think would we expect more competition as a result of all this? I think the answer directionally would be yes.
Would we view the underlying driver of that competition that consumers are more excited about buying cars online and that that transition has been accelerated as a much bigger positive than the increase in competition is potentially a negative? Absolutely. I think overall, we're feeling very optimistic about the long-term impacts of this, or at least the medium-term impacts of this. From a long-term perspective, it's hard to know exactly how this will play out.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Mike Montani of Evercore. Please proceed with your question.
Great. Thanks for taking the question. The questions I had are along the lines of two different areas. One would be with the Ally deal in place now, just trying to get a handle on the magnitude of profit pressure that we might anticipate on like-for-like loans. Is that something that would remain in place over the course of the next year? Then there's a follow-up.
Sure. I don't think we want to quantify that right now, because I think what happens in an environment like this is severalfold. Loss expectations tend to go up, which all else constant would reduce premiums. The yields that risk takers expect to earn tend to go up, which all else constant would reduce premiums. Consumer interest rates tend to go up as well, which all else constant tends to increase premiums. The balance of those things is a little bit hard to predict. Historically, the value of loans originated through automotive retailers and finance companies through that kind of combined stack has been fairly stable. Our expectation would be for that to converge back to where it was prior to this and then continue its upward journey from there. I think the exact timing of all that is unclear.
I think whether the next step is a positive one or a negative one is unclear. We've definitely taken steps to try to make sure that the loans originating are very desirable loans. We've tightened credit pretty significantly going into this in an effort to make sure that we were positioning ourselves conservatively. We modeled the way that we were tightening credit off of the way that credit was ultimately tightened and performed in the 2008 and 2009 financial crisis. We made the assumption that losses will deteriorate a similar degree. That's a more severe assumption than most rating agencies are making in the securitizations that are getting done today. We made the assumption that investor yields would go up to where they were in the 2008, 2009 crisis.
That seems to be similar to or more severe than the implied yields that seem to be clearing in the securitization market today, although that is a volatile market. I think in terms of what we're originating, we feel very good about it. We feel like we thought carefully about what we wanted to do to credit. We believe that tightening credit in those ways has likely reduced our overall volume by something on the order of 25%, which is very, very significant. I think also speaks to how strong the demand is that we're seeing because from all indications, it seems that we have likely tightened credit more than the rest of the industry has. Absent that tightening, we may be performing even better.
We've made those moves to ensure that we're positioned defensively as we continue to monitor what's going on, and then we'll figure out what the right next move is from here.
Okay, great. Thanks. If I could, just some additional color on the wholesale front. Just curious to see what you all are finding in terms of pricing over the past couple of weeks on the wholesale pricing. What's the read-through for that in terms of two areas? One would be GPUs. Should we anticipate any further kind of mark-to-market adjustments on GPUs in 2Q? If you assume kind of current trends persist, that 1Q markdown was enough. The second question would be on the consumer side and the trade-in side, is the 70% and 40% ratios kind of good to go again now given that you guys are once again in the market and purchasing cars for consumers? Are you trying to be more deliberate and not scale that up as quickly as it was?
Sure. I'll take the question on wholesale GPU. We don't expect any of the adjustments that we talked about earlier to recur in future periods. However, I do think it's reasonable to assume that wholesale GPU will be lower than a normalized level in Q2. I think there's still an awful lot of uncertainty around how exactly the wholesale market is going to evolve from here. I think we've started to see some volume come back but certainly not at normalized levels yet. I think we'll see what happens in the market, but there's certainly a lot of uncertainty right now. I think a reasonable expectation is that Q2 will be lower than normalized levels.
As it relates to the customer source of vehicles, I think neither the 70%, which was the percentage of cars that we were buying relative to the number of cars that we were selling, nor the 40%, which is the percentage of cars that we were selling to customers that were previously bought from customers, neither of those numbers were our long-term goals, and both of those numbers were on steep positive trajectories heading into this. We did pause purchasing through all channels except for customer trade-ins early in this cycle. That will clearly push down that 70% number just directly because we're not buying cars and we are selling cars. That just kind of mechanically drops at least in a transitory way.
The 40% number is a function of when we turn purchasing back on, what ratio of purchasing is coming from customers versus what is coming from other sources. I think that there is uncertainty in what that ratio will be in the near term. In the medium term and long term, we would expect it to go back to where it was before and to continue to climb because buying cars from customers is the most fundamental and most economic source of cars that there is, and so that's where you want to be buying cars. Given the dramatic moves in the market, buying cars from customers is effectively happening in a much less liquid market where you have a single seller selling a single car once every many years. Whereas the wholesale markets are much more liquid.
If you have rapid price disruptions, those wholesale markets tend to virtually instantaneously adapt to that new environment, whereas the consumer market tends to be a little stickier in both directions. We will be monitoring both of those markets and getting a sense of where the better market is to acquire inventory in the near term. In the medium and long term, our expectations would be to march back to where we were and continue from there.
Thank you. Your last question today will come from Brad Erickson of Needham & Company. Please proceed with your question.
Hi, guys. Thanks. I have a couple of follow-ups. Ernie, you were just kind of talking about a little bit on the auction, the wholesale area, but just wanted to go a little further. What needs to happen really before those physical auctions can function normally again? Just kind of how vital that is for you to have enough inventory to keep driving growth? Then I have a follow-up.
Sure. I think the auctions are functioning fairly normally again, in the sense that you can buy and sell cars, and the volume is on the order of half of what it would've likely otherwise been if it weren't for all of this. Prior to this, the majority of buyers through many of the larger auction houses were already buying cars online. Many more buyers have moved to buying cars online. The auctions are functioning, and so I don't think that that is a fundamental limiter to moving back to whatever levels we would like to in terms of acquisitions. I think the thing that we want to be careful about is our expectations for what's going to happen to prices. Prices have stabilized and started to recover. There are still reasons to believe that prices could drop again.
There are many sellers or shadow sellers that are out there that have not moved inventory yet. We want to be mindful of watching that carefully and getting a sense of what that's going to do to the market. That's something we're keeping a careful eye on, and that's part of why we've made the decision to manage our inventory levels down and reduce our exposure there. Now, the opportunity is also extraordinarily large because the wholesale market has dropped pretty significantly in most recent weeks down probably on the order of about 12%, and the retail markets have only dropped a couple percent. The implied wholesale retail spread is much wider, on the order of 9% wider than it normally is.
That does generate a lot of opportunity because it suggests that there are much larger margins than are normally available for the taking there. We're trying to balance the risk with the upside opportunity. I think all that's coming together into our strategy that we've been discussing on the call.
Got it. Then just one last one, and I apologize if you touched on this earlier. I jumped on late. This is a question really for Mark. Can you give any sort of EBITDA loss expectation for the year under some plausible scenario if the business were to stay where it's at today with the April growth rates? Just any guardrails as to how to think about that, or even on a basis where what level the business would have to be at from here to be, say, EBITDA breakeven might be another way to get at it. Any help on that, Mark, would be great. Thanks.
Sure. Yeah. I think I'll start with Q2. I think maybe a way to summarize some of the directional things that you should be keeping in mind as it relates to that question, and a lot of these we've hit on this call so far. We do expect GPU to drop somewhat meaningfully from Q1 to Q2 as a result of some of the dynamics that we were talking about earlier on this call, particularly in retail GPU. I think we also expect expenses per unit to meaningfully drop going from Q1 to Q2. There, I think just to give a rough ballpark of order of magnitude dropping down to sort of second half 2019 levels on SG&A per car sold. We think the combination of those two things will certainly lead to reduced EBITDA dollar losses in Q2.
We would expect things getting better from there as well.
Got it. That's great.
Thank you. This concludes our question and answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.
I'd like to thank everyone for joining the call. We really appreciate it. I also want to turn to team Carvana out there in telephone land. Thank you to all of you for the job you've done over the last six weeks. We have crammed so much into that very short period. Everyone's been working unbelievably hard. The results speak for themselves. We've made tremendous strides in the business, and that's 100% because of how hard you guys are all working. I truly can't thank you enough. It's admirable, and we really appreciate it. Let's keep fighting through the rest of this. We're in a great spot. Thank you, everyone.
The conference is now concluded. Thank you very much for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.