What counts as a stale unit on a dealer lot

Ask three dealer principals what "stale" means and you'll get three different cutoffs. There's no DOT-style regulation on this, just floor-plan math and habit.

The common aging buckets

Most dealers and their floor-plan lenders think in 90-day bands. A new unit sitting on the lot for 90 days or less is unremarkable. The aging report reclassifies it at day 91, moving it into a different column. By 180 days, floor-plan interest has usually eaten enough margin that the sales manager is getting asked about it in the Monday meeting. Past 365 days, most OEM floor-plan assistance programs stop helping with the carrying cost, and the unit sits as dead weight on the balance sheet.

Used inventory ages faster in people's minds even though the clock rules are the same. A used dozer sitting 120 days reads as "stale" to a GM in a way a new one at 120 days doesn't, mostly because everyone assumes a trade-in has something wrong with it if nobody's bid on it yet.

A unit can sit 200 days because of a paint color nobody wants, a spec mismatch for the territory, or just bad timing against a competitor's rebate. The 90/180/365 clock measures carrying cost and floor-plan interest. Wear, hours, and condition don't factor into it at all.

Why lot aging isn't the number you need

Here's the gap: a 90/180/365 report tells a sales planning manager which SKUs a dealer bought wrong or priced wrong. It says nothing about whether that dealer's customers are due for a trade-in. Those are two different clocks, and OEM teams chasing replacement campaigns regularly confuse them.

A dealer can carry zero stale units, floor plan turning clean every quarter, and still be sitting on a territory full of six and seven-year-old machines at customer yards that nobody's called on in two years. The lot looks healthy. The installed base doesn't. That's the number that predicts the next wave of trade-ins and the next order for the OEM, and it isn't on any floor-plan aging report, because that report only covers what the dealer hasn't sold yet, not what the dealer already sold years ago and hasn't seen since.

Reps used to fill that gap by driving the territory and eyeballing which yards looked tired. That works until the rep changes territories, or the yard is gated, or there are forty customer sites and four weeks a quarter to cover them. "That lot looked old last time I drove past" isn't a dataset, it's a memory with an expiration date.

That's the problem Fleet Turnover Monitor is built around: a quarterly pass over a dealer's customer sites that tracks what showed up, what left, and what's been sitting on the same yard since three passes back, turned into a dated turnover map instead of a rep's gut feel.

If floor-plan aging only tells you what a dealer can't sell, and you need to know which customer sites are actually due for a replacement push, that's a different question worth putting a real answer to.