One fallout from the pandemic and the inflation that followed has been a dramatic decrease in the number of late-model vehicles available for under $20,000, according to a new study from iSeeCars, an online vehicle marketplace.
Back in 2019, nearly half of all late-model used vehicles, defined as those under five years old, could be purchased for under $20,000. But this year, only 12.4% fell under that price point, according to the study.
And for those with only $15,000 to spend, the availability of late-model vehicles went from 23% of the market nationally to only 1.6%.
The decline was more extreme in metro Denver, where the share of sub-$20,000 vehicles fell from 41.6% to 9%, the sixth largest decline of the 50 metro areas examined.
“During the pandemic lockdowns, one of the few things people could still do was take a drive, and clearly many of them did,” said Karl Brauer, an executive analyst with iSeeCars. “This drove up the mileage across the used car market, but the supply of new and used cars was so constricted that the additional mileage didn’t hurt used car prices — they still went up.”
Read the full story from our partners at The Denver Post.
