For the second year in a row, Automotive News rigorously documented the dealership buy-sell market. This data served as the foundation for our package of stories in this week’s issue that examine 2022 and beyond.

For subscribers, it’s a one-stop shop of buy-sell data that won’t be found anywhere else.

One key takeaway? The dealership buy-sell market in 2022 was a different kind of busy.

As we document in our package of stories, the theme of the buy-sell market last year was that private dealers and groups — not publicly traded auto retailers — were collectively the most active buyers.

This was a significant change from 2021 in which four public groups completed four of the largest acquisitions in auto retail history on top of what was already an active year for buy-sells.

In fact, the number of transactions in 2022 was actually higher than 2021’s, Automotive News found. But the number of dealerships sold in 2022 was down from 2021, largely because of another trend: no megadeals similar in size to those four blockbuster transactions of 2021.

Dealership lawyer Stephen Dietrich, a partner with Holland & Knight in Denver, described the 2022 buy-sell market as consistent.

“People were still seeing the value [of buying stores], still wanted to get deals done and I think people were very energized to get deals done,” Dietrich told Automotive News.

And the deals, and buy-sell tracking, continues.

Automotive News so far this year tracked at least 90 first-quarter transactions, up 9.8 percent over the number of transactions in the first quarter last year. And for the second quarter, Automotive News has noted at least 93 transactions, though recording for those three months continues.

In addition to the stories, our interactive buy-sell data, now under the Automotive News Research & Data Center umbrella, has been redesigned to give subscribers the information they seek in a clearer, more detailed way.

Subscribers can now search for transaction data by year or quarter, sort by buyer or seller and download our complete data as an Excel spreadsheet.