CDK’s latest car buyer survey finds U.S. dealers earned a 66% “Easy to Purchase” score last month, down from 85% in October and the single lowest score CDK has registered since its first survey in 2022.

Respondents gave dealers low grades on all four components of the score: finding the desired vehicle (73%), negotiating the price (57%), applying for credit (63%) and, perhaps most notably, negotiating trade-in value, which fell from 66% in October to 45% in November.

CDK analyst and content director David Thomas notes that many of the metrics that rely solely on dealer performance remained flat.

“The volatility in the used market right alongside low levels of equity may have also impacted the score for how easy it was to agree on the trade-in value. … Those outside factors are sometimes difficult to contend with but something generally in a dealer’s control, like the test drive, would seem less likely to see a similar fall,” Thomas writes.

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