Ernest Garcia
Analyst · Wells Fargo
Thanks, Alex, and welcome, everyone, to our second quarter conference call. Hopefully, you've all had the chance to look over our shareholder letter, which is available on our Investor Relations site. As I go through my prepared remarks, I will reference some graphs and figures in the letter, so it may be helpful to have that with you.
We are extremely excited about the results we had in the quarter and about the trajectory of the business in general. As we laid out in our Q1 call, we are focused on 3 key objectives for the business: growing retail units and revenue, increasing total gross profit per unit and demonstrating operating leverage. First, let's hit objective #1, growing retail units and revenue. In the quarter, we grew unit sales 145% year-over-year, added 7 markets, our fastest quarterly market opening rate to date, and opened one vending machine in Dallas, Texas. This accelerating growth was driven by the market share ramp trends we have seen historically. Our most mature markets continue to grow in market share. New markets continue to ramp sales faster on average than older markets, and vending machines continued to contribute meaningfully to our market share ramp when opened.
In addition, we upsized and extended our inventory line with Ally Bank on August 4 to support our anticipated inventory and sales growth over the next year. Ally has been a great partner for us for a long time and we are excited to be extending that partnership further.
Next, we'll hit objective #2, increasing total gross profit. We continue to make significant progress toward our midterm goal of $3,000 of total GPU in the second quarter, increasing total GPU sequentially from Q1 by over $300. Importantly, this improvement was achieved despite the headwind provided by average days to sale increasing room 93 to 105 days in the quarter, as anticipated and described in our Q1 call. Days to sale is generally driven by 2 factors, the speed at which we are selling cars relative to our inventory size; and the timing of when we purchase the cars that are in our inventory. In this case, I think it is important to decompose those factors, so let's hit sales relative to inventory first.
As you can see in the graph on Page 7 of our shareholder letter, inventory has been relatively flat since we've hit an inflection point in the fourth quarter of 2016, and over that 6-month period, we have grown sales by about 90%. There's a clear evidence that we are able to grow sales significantly without growing inventory by adding new markets, allowing younger markets to catch up in market share to older markets and continuing to grow market share in our more mature markets. We think this is a really big deal because it makes clear the leverage inherent in our pooled inventory model that will power our decrease in average days to sale over the next several quarters, and because this improvement in average days to sale is the single biggest contributor to our walk from $1,500 in total GPU today to our midterm goal of $3,000. The remaining effect that drives turn time is when sold cars were purchased. This can be seen in the same graph in Page 7 of the shareholder letter.
We built up significant inventory in the fourth quarter of 2016 in anticipation of the sales growth in the first half of the year and have held inventory relatively flat since then. This vehicle acquisition timing was a significant driver of average days to sale going up in the second quarter as many of the cars we sold were purchased in that fourth quarter inventory build period. We believe this is good news and that the first effect is the bigger driver over time, and we are expecting average days to sales to start to reduce from here, providing a significant tailwind toward our midterm total GPU goal. As we did in Q4 last year, we do expect to start growing our inventory in the fourth quarter when prices are historically lower and in anticipation of the significant sales increases we expect from the first half of 2018. That said, this increase will take place at a rate that allows us to keep reducing our average days to sale in the fourth quarter and into 2018.
During the second quarter, we acquired and joined forces with Carlypso, a fellow automotive disruptor. Carlypso's business had been focused on making vehicles at auction available to customers by merchandising and listing those cars on its site prior to purchasing the cars. This focus caused them to build the tool set that is powerful and highly complementary to our own. Getting high-quality vehicle data describing which features, options and packages are on any given car and valuing those features and options is a notoriously difficult problem in the automotive industry. Carlypso built a number of tools that collect and clean vehicle data from many disparate resources and then analyze that data to properly understand the value of each car. The uses for us of these tools are clear and take many forms: automated bidding optimization and vehicle acquisitions across channels including direct-from-consumer, merchandising inventory with better vehicle descriptions and price optimization of vehicles available for sale on our site. Many of these integrations are already well underway and we expect some of the early benefits to begin to show later this quarter, with more meaningful benefits rolling out over the next 12 months.
Now on to objective #3, demonstrating operating leverage. This is another area where we made significant progress, cutting our EBITDA margin losses by 25% in the quarter sequentially. This number did benefit a bit from the timing of certain expenses being pushed into Q3. But even when taking that into account, the progress significantly exceeded our own expectations. This improvement resulted from leverage showing up in many areas of the business and from a lot of hard work from our operations and technical teams that deserve special recognition.
I'd also like to touch on our national marketing initiative. As discussed in our previous call, we have now reached the point that several cable channels are less expensive to buy nationally than they are to buy in some of our local markets. As a result, we began rolling out national advertising in the quarter and the initial results, while highly preliminary, look strong. Specifically, we have seen early funnel activity in markets where we do not offer local delivery or utilize local marketing increase by about 80% quarter-over-quarter. There's evidence we are building awareness and demand in markets that we do not yet deliver in but believe a vast majority of the sales won't begin to show up until we open those markets for free local delivery. Accordingly, we expect the benefits of national advertising to be slow building and don't anticipate meaningful contribution to our unit sales volume through the end of this year.
Lastly, I'd like to briefly hit on our guidance for the third quarter. Our range for units and revenue for the third quarter is a bit wider than we would typically provide. Historically, we have seen sales bumps in the third quarter that we believe are driven by OEM advertising for their model year-end sales. Given that we sell a lot of late-model cars, we generally benefit from this advertising surge. Looking back to the last 3 years, we have seen significant variation how large that transitory bump is, and therefore, our guidance range of 129% to 159% year-over-year unit growth in the third quarter reflects our uncertainty around the size of this year's impact.
In summary, this is an exceptionally strong quarter and the underlying fundamentals of the business are strong. Something we are very focused on as a management team is executing across each of our objectives while also scaling at very high rates of growth and maintaining the great customer expenses that got us here in the first place.
The national cadence of the business, given our seasonal patterns, is that we experience our most explosive growth in the first half of the year, which took the form of 90% growth from Q4 2016 through Q2 2017. The first half of the year is the time that execution risks are most pronounced as a result of that growth, and we are very proud of our various teams for the jobs they've done over the last 2 quarters to power us through.
The second half of the year is about continuing that momentum and building our operational and technical capabilities to be able to support that expected growth in the first half of 2018, and we are well on our way.
Mark, with that, I'll hand it off to you.