From European furniture, fresh design styles and upscale guest lounges to lighting packages that don’t cast shadows on the merchandise, more car dealerships are striving to become exceptional retail properties.
Earlier this year, three car dealership construction/renovation projects — Acura Hunt Valley, King Kia in Laurel and Fairfax Mazda — won Awards of Excellence from ABC Baltimore and ABC Virginia.
“We are seeing car dealerships go through dramatic transformations,” said Syd Syed, Project Executive for Chesapeake Contracting. Chesapeake completed the Acura Hunt Valley and Fairfax Mazda projects, and Syed has specialized in car dealership construction for 20 years.
“These used to be purely transactional spaces. There was no excitement for customers,” Syed said. “Now, manufacturers are in a kind of a race to see whose dealership is better looking.”
That drive has sparked an uptick in renovation and expansion projects. Many dealers who used to wait a decade or longer to renovate their space, are scheduling sweeping renovations on five-year cycles, Syed said.
In addition, a string of acquisitions of smaller car dealership owners by larger companies has prompted renovations of those acquired properties, he said.
And the updates are stunning.
New exteriors include sleek metal panels, high-end lighting and expanded landscaping. Showrooms and sales areas are becoming brighter and more expansive by adding improved finishes and replacing traditional sales offices with open-concept, glass-paneled cubicles.
Inside King Kia, crews raised the ceiling of one earlier addition and outfitted the new showroom with porcelain tile, top-grade LED lighting, new millwork and modernized Kia-standard colors and finishes that were designed to convey a fresh, impressive image of the brand.
“We built a brand-new break room and a new, beautiful customer lounge that has a coffee bar, credenzas, nice seating, music and comfortable places where people can wait for their cars to be serviced,” said Scott Albright, Senior Vice President of MacKenzie Contracting Company, which completed the King Kia renovation.
The project also included a 1,500-square-foot addition. It created a large, drive-through space outfitted with automatic, roll-up doors to allow customers to drop off their cars in an enclosed, conditioned space.
In an era when customers can buy cars by clicking a button on a website or dropping a token in a giant vending machine, Albright said, “the industry is trying to attract people back into dealerships so they can have face-to-face interactions and show the bright finishes and car features.”
“In some dealerships, like Nissan or Porsche, you can sit in a customer waiting area that has fancy, very expensive rugs, European-style chairs and a big window that looks down onto the shop so you can see your car getting fixed,” Syed said.
And those formerly grungy repair shops are looking much nicer due to the addition of attractive floor tiles, all LED lighting, and bright paint.
The occasional dealer has added standout features, including an indoor garden beneath skylights or a guest minibar. Maserati greatly “improved its new car delivery area with special lighting so there should be no shadows on the car,” Syed said.
Ambitious, regular and undoubtedly costly renovations seem to be generating significant results for some dealers.
“I have been told that once we renovate a building, the sales go up,” Syed said. “A year later, the dealer will call us and say, can we put in more sales desks, more service desks.”