New-car floor traffic is down 12% YoY across the top 20 metros. Service traffic is up 4%. The buyers are still there they're in the service lounge, not the showroom.
The math
The average franchise dealer has 800-1,400 active service customers. Of those, roughly 22% are in a position to trade lease maturity, equity, or the vehicle is approaching an expensive repair window.
That's 175-300 warm prospects a month sitting in your building, drinking your coffee, waiting on their car.
What most stores do
Nothing. The service advisor writes the RO. The salesperson doesn't know that guest is there. The guest leaves, gets an OEM captive-lender mailer three weeks later, and returns to a different store.
What the top 20% do
1. Equity mining at write-up. DMS flags the guest's equity position. Service advisor mentions it once "by the way, if you're curious, your car's worth about $4,200 more than you owe right now." That's it. Not a pitch. A fact.
2. Sales-desk service walk once a day. A sales manager walks the service lounge at 10am and 2pm. Introduces themselves to 3-4 guests, asks about their car, hands a card. That's it.
3. Recall notices that book appointments. A recall email that leads with "we can also give you a quick value on your car while it's here" gets a 4x lift on floor traffic vs a plain recall email.
The tone
The reason this works is that it doesn't feel like a pitch. The guest is already at your store, trusting you with their car. Bringing up their equity as information, not as a close, is the only version that works. Anything harder and they never come back for service either.
The number
Stores running this well pull 8-14 additional units per month out of the service drive. On a store doing 80 new + 60 used, that's a 6-10% lift on total unit sales with zero incremental marketing spend.
Two tools to run this: the Orphan Owner Reactivation sequence for service customers whose salesperson is gone, and the Lease Maturity Outreach 120/60/30 sequence to catch them before the captive lender does.