Online dealer Carvana posted another in a string of company firsts, achieving a profit on record revenue in Q3 2025 despite a cooling down in the used-car market. 

Carvana posted $5.65 billion in revenue, up 55% year-over-year and up from its previous record of $4.84 billion set the previous quarter. The company sold 156,000 vehicles, another record.

Carvana reported net income of $263 million, up $115 million y-o-y, though down from $308 million in Q2.

During an earnings call with investors, Carvana CEO Ernie Garcia III boasted that Carvana had profit margins more than two times the industry average and unit sales growth above 40% when other public retailers have been nearly flat.

“We remain the most profitable and fastest-growing automotive retailer,” Garcia said. “These data points are exciting in isolation. Achieving them simultaneously is rare and points to an exceptional future.”

Industrywide, used car wholesale sales were down slightly from Q2 and y-o-y, according to a study by Manheim, and Carvana felt it.

Gross profits per unit were down for both Carvana’s retail and wholesale businesses, which the company attributed to an expected drop off after tariff scares drove an outsized group of buyers to car lots in hopes of avoiding higher prices.

“We attribute that to some effects from the late March auto tariff announcements,” Carvana CFO Mark Jenkins said during a call with investors. “I think on the contrary, Q3 was a bit of a softer depreciation quarter on a year-over-year basis. I think we would attribute that almost an offset to the Q2 strength.”

Decline in per-unit profits was also due to an increase in advertising. After Carvana’s brush with bankruptcy in 2023, the company pared down its business and focused on efficiency, cutting out advertising almost entirely. 

In the last few quarters, it has recharged its marketing efforts. Advertising expenses increased by $139 per car sold in Q3, with expectations for Q4 spending to be equal or slightly higher.

That effort goes to one of three pillars of Carvana’s strategy: building understanding, awareness and trust. During a period of explosive growth and inadequate staffing during the pandemic, Carvana was the subject of lawsuits and state enforcement actions due to registration and titling problems (see here and here).

Improved registration processes are part of a R&D project that uses Phoenix as a test market.

Thanks to this project, 40% of customers in Phoenix receive their cars within a day of buying them online, versus a national average of 10%.

Phoenix is also a test market for more efficient finance verifications, vehicle staging, delivery scheduling systems, and staffing models, the company said.

ReCore Solutions, a provider of data licensing for the California Regional Multiple Listing Service (CRMLS), had filed suit against Homes.com and its owned CoStar Group due to a reportedly unpaid subscription bill. ReCore had also threatened to cut off Homes.com’s listing feed, potentially neutering the site in the most populous state in the country.

However, the parties have settled. CRMLS posted a statement on its website Thursday Oct. 23, reading:

“CoStar Group and CRMLS are happy to announce that they have renewed their long-term agreement under which Homes.com will continue to receive CRMLS listings. An action filed Tuesday by REcore concerning such listings is being dismissed with prejudice. CoStar Group and CRMLS are delighted to continue their long-standing relationship with no interruption in the flow of CRMLS listings to Homes.com.”

U.S. property portals such as Homes.com and Zillow gain listings feeds from MLS’s by obtaining brokerage licenses and registering with the services as brokerages. But unlike actual brokerages, which get the listings feeds as a membership benefit at no extra costs, portals pay extra.

ReCore told industry news site Inman that Homes.com agreed to pay about $2 per listing displayed on the portal.

Citing “a bulletin sent to dealers this week,” the news site said Ford retailers have the opportunity to list Ford Blue Advantage Certified Pre-Owned vehicles on Amazon Autos. 

Ford franchise dealers, who have the prerogative to join or not join, have been offered a six-month free trial to take part and have until the end of this year to express interest, the news site reported. 

The letter didn’t say whether or not the offer went out to dealers nationwide or to just those in select markets. When Amazon Autos launched publicly in December 2024, it involved only Hyundai dealers in 48 cities. The number of markets has since jumped to 130 with the help of additional dealers from Hertz CarSales, Amazon Autos’s second retail affiliate.

The AIM Group emailed Amazon and Ford to confirm the Car Direct report, but we didn’t hear back immediately from either. 

Amazon Autos has been keen to expand to other brands because limited selection is customers’ number-one complaint, Amazon Autos director and GM Fan Jin told participants this week at Presidio Automotive Tech Summit in Denver.

Jin hinted the company would soon add additional brands to its program, but kept that intel close to the vest. “We will be making announcements,” she said.

As the no. 3 biggest brand in the U.S. in terms of sales volume, after GM and Toyota and just ahead of No. 4 Hyundai, Ford could add substantially to Amazon Autos’s selection.

Amazon Autos lets participating dealers list cars on a dedicated section of the retailers’ website, and customers can shop and select cars, arrange financing from a selection of lenders and purchase the vehicle. The last step, vehicle pickup, must be done at the dealership; Amazon does not handle delivery as it does with smaller items.

In scale, the cuts would be “slightly more” than the 22% reduction made in December 2024, OfferUp chief business officer Nathan Garnett told the AIM Group. They will impact multiple roles, including engineering staff. Garnett said, however, that generative AI was not to blame, adding the company’s thinking on AI is to train staff how to use it.

Garnett declined to say which leaders will lose their jobs, but noted that CEO Todd Dunlap would remain, along with chief growth officer Ian Fliflet and Garnett himself. The latter two will both have expanded roles.

The company is making the cuts as it narrows its focus to local transactions, including c-to-c and b-to-c, and ends shipping, which it had already deemphasized due to its high costs. 

Shipping was a “low-margin” business for OfferUp, and the company had researched it well enough to understand that few users came to the marketplace because of it. Garnett said the company was confident the change wouldn’t lead to a significant loss of users.

“This is a conversation we’ve had many times over the years,” he said. “It felt like the right time to make that move.”

Dunlap sent a letter to employees this week explaining the changes: “We are resetting the company to be more focused on reaching and serving the local communities that rely on OfferUp and that helped make OfferUp what it is today,” 

Along with dropping shipping, other key changes include:

• Exploring ways to update the OfferUp app.
• Bolstering the company’s marketing team and a planned increase in marketing spending. 
• Consolidation of teams focused on OfferUp’s b-to-c verticals that cater to auto dealers, small retailers, service providers, recruiters and landlords/apartment managers. 

The staffing cuts were called for as the company pares down services and strives for a profit. OfferUp, founded in 2011, has had just one profitable year, 2023, and last year, it fell just short of profitability. During both 2023 and 2024, OfferUp had revenue between $100 million and $150 million. 

OfferUp attributed last year’s miss on profits to a drop in programmatic ad rates, which impacted revenue from ads mixed in with search results. 

Ad revenue has improved in recent months but was a break-even business on average, Garnett said. “We were slightly profitable before the restructuring, and we’ll be very profitable after,” he added. “We need to significantly increase our user base to achieve our long term goals.”

The headcount cuts are meant to boost cash flow so OfferUp has more money to market the app to consumers.

Garnett said OfferUp’s users appreciate the app, but there’s a challenge in “keeping OfferUp top of mind” so that they use it continually. The company hopes marketing will achieve that.

OfferUp has promised laid-off employees at least ten weeks of severance pay, a continuation of health benefits until the end of the year and outplacement services for those seeking a new job. It will let terminated employees keep their OfferUp laptops.

After last December’s layoffs, OfferUp’s headcount dropped below 300. By February this year, it had been fallen to between 200 and 250.

Since Dunlap took over as CEO in 2021, he has made a few changes in an effort to make a profit, including the development of verticals. But with teams focused on b-to-c being cut back, that strategy has apparently not been the growth driver OfferUp had hoped. 

“Local businesses can be an important part of our platform, but we must be thoughtful about the balance between business offerings and the core user-to-user interactions,” Dunlap said in his note to employees.

The company has signed an agreement in which Fair Holdings, led by Painter, would become the new owner through an all-cash deal at $2.55 per share or $227 million in total.

The announcement drove the share price up 68% from a closing price of $1.48 on Tuesday (Oct. 14) to Wednesday morning’s opening at $2.49. The price had eased to $2.36 by noon on Wednesday.

Fair Holdings said it was negotiating with various financial and strategic investors to raise funds for the acquisition. “This group is expected to comprise seasoned leaders and institutions across automotive retail, finance and technology, which are integral to Fair Holdings’ operating plan and bring the expertise to scale TrueCar’s business,” Fair Holdings said in a media release. 

“Through this transaction, we are pleased to deliver compelling value to TrueCar stockholders,” said Barbara Carbone, chair of TrueCar’s board of directors. “The Board unanimously approved this transaction after a thorough and careful evaluation of potential value creation opportunities, and we are confident it is in the best interest of TrueCar stockholders and other stakeholders.”

Painter, who co-founded TrueCar in 2005 and led it until 2015, will return as CEO, replacing Jantoon Reigersman, a four-year company veteran who’s held the top spot since 2023. The announcement didn’t say what the future holds for Reigersman.

The sale, which concluded a strategic review that began late last year, is expected to close by early 2026, according to the announcement. The deal is subject to approval by shareholders and regulators. TrueCar’s largest collective stockholder, Caledonia Investments, has committed to vote in favor, the announcement said.

TrueCar ranks as the No. 7 U.S. auto site by traffic and the No. 4 pure-play auto marketplace. The company differentiates itself by offering shoppers a guaranteed price on cars that subscribing dealers promise not to negotiate once the buyer comes to close the sale.

Once a promising challenger to the top three sites (CarGurus, Autotrader.com and Cars.com), it lost favor with marketing that cast a bad light on dealerships (i.e. the company’s pitch around “the true price” inferred prices in dealer ads couldn’t be trusted).

That controversy led to a subscriber revolt and, eventually, Painter’s ouster. TrueCar’s revenues peaked in 2018 and 2019, hitting $335 million during both years. It subsequently went downhill, bottoming out at $159 million in 2023.

Alone among U.S. auto sites, TrueCar depends on car sales for its revenue. Instead of selling leads, TrueCar collects a success fee on completed transactions. This has been a challenge for the company, and it was hit especially hard during the pandemic when new-car sales declined significantly. But over the last two years, TrueCar has been growing revenue under Reigersman, hitting 12% year-on-year growth in Q2 despite a sluggish car market. Uncertainty about the economy, though, led the company to pause a hiring plan that it had hoped would propel even stronger growth. 

Painter has a long history of automotive ventures. In 1998, he founded CarsDirect, the first company to sell cars online. He then founded TrueCar with Tom Taira and since leaving as CEO, he’s worked on a couple of other projects. 

The biggest was Fair.com, a California-based car-subscription company that offered vehicles for a monthly fee that included servicing. Its promise of easily arranged subscriptions and car pickups with an app was meant to appeal to younger customers. However, the company, which had raised $2.1 billion in financing, burned through much of that in a hasty effort to expand across the country. Lead investor Softbank apparently lost faith, leading to massive layoffs. Painter resigned as CEO but kept a board seat.

After Fair’s demise, Painter started a couple other ventures, but the focus shifted over the years. 

In April 2021, he and his former partner in Fair.com, George Bauer, launched NextCar, which offered the subscription software developed at Fair.com to third-party operators. It was meant to be an asset-light version of Fair. NextCar was rebranded Autonomy, and later, Autonomy acquired a small fleet of Teslas and became, like Fair, a subscription service, albeit one specializing in EVs.

Matthew Crawford

Crawford is leaving of his own accord “to pursue another opportunity outside of the company,” the filing states. He will support a transition plan while the company starts looking for a replacement.

Crawford joined Cars.com in January 2022 as chief product officer and had “innovation” tacked onto his title in June last year.

Before Cars.com, Crawford worked six years at Sysco Labs, the R&D branch of the global food services company, rising to the position of VP of commercial technology.

Before Sysco, he worked at SpareFoot, a storage-facility marketplace; Civitas Learning, a software vendor for higher education; SolarWinds, an IT and network management company; and Front Gate Tickets, an online ticketing provider.

Crawford has a masters of science in technology commercialization from Texas McCombs School of Business in Austin.

Revenue at Cars Commerce, owner of Cars.com — the No.2 autos site in the U.S. — stood at $179 million in Q2 2025, virtually unchanged year on year.