Local car dealerships growing, dying amid rise of mega auto retailers

Derek Sylvester’s father built the family’s original Chevrolet dealership with his bare hands on Main Street in rural Peckville, Pennsylvania, in 1972.

The store and family have been a pillar of the village, outside Scranton, ever since. That was until late last month, when Sylvester and his family closed a deal to sell Sylvester Chevrolet to a New York-based dealer group.

“As a family, we decided this might be the time,” said Sylvester, who at 67 has been contemplating retirement. “Unless you’re a larger store, a much larger store, it’s a little bit harder to make money. … It’s just scale.”

Many of Sylvester’s family members plan to continue working at the dealership, but he said they didn’t feel they were in a position to continue running the business amid the rapidly changing automotive retail landscape in the U.S. The industry is facing a tumultuous adoption of all-electric vehicles, technological shifts such as artificial intelligence, and growing demands from automakers.

Sales of dealerships such as Sylvester Chevrolet are occurring across the country at a rapid pace as the business of selling cars, once considered the purview of mom-and-pop shops, has evolved into a lucrative trillion-dollar industry rife with consolidation that has drawn more notice from Wall Street and investors in recent years.

While the National Automobile Dealers Association, or NADA, reports that the vast majority of its U.S. franchised dealers are small business owners such as Sylvester who have fewer than six stores, the top retailers in the country have significantly grown.

The top 150 dealers sold 27% of all retail and fleet new vehicles in 2025, up from 24.3% in 2021 and 21.2% in 2015, according to Automotive News’ annual ranking of top automotive retailers. They also owned roughly a quarter of dealerships last year, up from less than 20% a decade ago, according to the trade publication.

Meanwhile, top publicly traded dealers such as Lithia Motors and AutoNation have ballooned to market caps of more than $6 billion each. Even online used-car retailer Carvana — and its $74 billion market cap, which surpasses the value of most car companies it sells vehicles from — has quietly started purchasing new vehicle franchises without disclosing its future plans.

“There’s a lot of money that wants to come to the industry,” Brian Gordon, president of dealer advisor and broker Dave Cantin Group, told CNBC. “And, generally, the industry is sort of aligned on how to value these things. That makes for a good climate for [mergers and acquisitions].”