Consider this question for a moment: If someone asked you right now how many titles are sitting past 30 days across all your rooftops, could you provide an accurate answer without making a dozen phone calls?
Most CFOs and controllers can tell you their floorplan balance to the dollar at any location. They can see inventory aging in real-time. But when it comes to title status across multiple stores, that same level of visibility simply does not exist.
That gap, between what dealership leadership can see everywhere else in the operation and what they can see in title processing, is the problem this article addresses.
It's not about dramatic breakdowns or regulatory catastrophes. It's about a specific operational blind spot that becomes more expensive as groups scale.
The Consolidation Context: Why This Matters Now
Regional consolidation is accelerating. The top 150 dealership groups now control over 30% of industry revenue, up 5% over the past five years, according to Advisors' 2024 Annual Blue Sky Report. But here is what is driving it: buyers are pursuing geographic clustering specifically to achieve operational efficiencies in back-office functions, marketing, and shared services.
Groups are paying premiums to acquire stores in the same market because the math works: centralized parts inventory, shared service staff, consolidated advertising. These are measurable efficiency gains.
The irony is this: the one function that most directly impacts how quickly funding is released and cash is realized—title processing—often remains entirely fragmented across stores. Different timelines, different habits, different escalation paths.
You're achieving efficiency everywhere except where it affects capital velocity.
What This Actually Looks Like in Daily Operations
Most dealership groups have competent title staff. The people doing this work understand their state's requirements and know how to process paperwork correctly. This isn't about criticizing effort or skill.
The gap is visibility and consistency at the group level. Here's what we hear repeatedly:
A controller needs to know which titles are aging past 30 days across all stores. The answer requires calling each location individually, asking someone to manually check their stack, and compiling responses in a spreadsheet. By the time the picture is assembled, it's already outdated.
A lender requests status on a specific title. The GM doesn't know which person at which store is handling it, so the question gets forwarded through multiple people before someone confirms it was submitted to the DMV two weeks ago — but nobody documented it.
One store consistently submits titles within 10 days. Another averages 25 days. The difference isn't capability — it's workflow. But leadership doesn't see the variance until it becomes a funding issue or a customer complaint.
A title gets rejected by the state for a correctable error. It sits in someone's inbox for a week before anyone notices, then takes another week to work back through the correction process. Nobody was ignoring it—it just wasn't visible to anyone responsible for escalation.
These aren't catastrophic failures. They're friction. But friction compounds across 10, 15, 20 rooftops. Each delay is a few days of capital that hasn't moved. Each exception that sits unnoticed is exposure that stays open longer than necessary.
Why Your DMS Doesn't Solve This
Dealership management systems are built to record transactions and maintain compliance documentation. They do that well. What they don't do—because it's not what they were designed for—is provide operational visibility into title lifecycle status.
Your DMS can tell you a vehicle was delivered and financed. It cannot tell you:
- Where a title is currently sitting in the workflow (pending docs, submitted to DMV, waiting on lien release, held for correction)
- How long it has been there
- Who owns resolution if there's an exception
- Which stores are consistently slower than others
- What the escalation path is when timelines extend
- An enterprise view of how many titles are aging across all locations right now
The DMS records what happened. It does not show what is happening, where bottlenecks are forming, or who needs to act.
For a single-point dealer, this is manageable through informal communication. For a multi-rooftop group, it becomes a structural gap.
What the Carvana Situation Actually Demonstrated
Carvana's title processing breakdown has been well documented: delayed registrations, state investigations, customer complaints, regulatory scrutiny. For most dealer groups, the scale isn't relevant. The lesson is.
What happened at Carvana wasn't fundamentally different from what happens at smaller scales in many groups. The underlying issue was the same: no systematic way to see where titles were stalled, no consistent enforcement of timelines, no clear accountability when exceptions occurred.
The difference was visibility. When problems are isolated to individual deals, they surface as customer service issues. When they aggregate across volume, they become regulatory events that attract state attention.
Regulators and lenders now view title processing delays as an indicator of operational control. Not because individual delays are inherently problematic, but because persistent delays suggest an absence of visibility and accountability at the systems level.
The question for multi-rooftop groups isn't whether you'll have a Carvana-scale breakdown. It's whether you can demonstrate systematic visibility when a lender or regulator asks about your title processing timelines.
The Actual Cost of This Gap
Delayed Funding
Every day a title remains unresolved is a day funding has not cleared. For a group financing $50 million per month, a three-day improvement in average days-to-funding equates to roughly $430,000 in improved cash positioning. This is not theoretical. It is a direct result of shorter title resolution timelines.
Management Time
The recurring question of "where is this title" from lenders, customers, and internal leadership consumes meaningful time across multiple roles. At the group level, this often adds up to 6-8 hours each week spent tracking status manually, time that could be avoided with consistent visibility.
Lender Relationships
Lenders pay attention to title submission timelines when assessing operational risk. While delays may not immediately affect rates, they do influence how lenders evaluate floorplan increases and term adjustments. Groups that can provide accurate title status are better positioned in these discussions.
What Operational Visibility Actually Requires
When you apply the same operational discipline to title processing that you already apply to inventory management or receivables tracking, several things change:
Defined workflow stages across all stores
Not rigid timelines that ignore state-specific realities, but standardized stages that let leadership see where any title is sitting: documents pending, submitted to state, awaiting lien release, held for correction, completed.
Clear ownership at each stage
When a title enters an exception status, such as rejection, missing documentation, or lien hold, a specific person owns resolution. Not a generic role, but an identified owner with escalation if timelines extend.
Enterprise visibility for leadership
A CFO or controller should be able to see, in real time, how many titles are past 30 days, which stores are faster or slower, and where exceptions are clustering, with the same clarity they have for inventory aging or receivables.
Early exception flagging
Problems that get addressed at day 15 are easier to resolve than problems discovered at day 35. Systematic visibility means exceptions surface earlier, when resolution is simpler and less costly.
Auditable documentation
When lenders or regulators ask about title controls, the answer should be documented workflows, aging reports, and exception timelines, not informal explanations or tribal knowledge.
This isn't about replacing staff or questioning their competence. It's about giving the people already doing this work — and their leadership — the same operational infrastructure that exists everywhere else in the business.
Where a Dedicated Tool Layer Becomes Necessary
This is the point where groups encounter a structural question: can we build this visibility into existing systems, or do we need a dedicated operational layer?
For some groups, particularly those with strong internal development resources, building custom visibility tools on top of their DMS is viable. For most, it's not the highest-value use of development time.
A Tag and Title Management System, whether built internally or purchased, serves a specific function: it sits between the DMS (which records transactions) and the people doing title work (who need to know what to act on next). It does not replace either. It creates operational visibility where none currently exists.
The characteristics that make these systems useful:
- They enforce consistent workflows across all stores while accommodating state-specific requirements
- They track lifecycle status in real-time, not through manual updates
- They flag exceptions automatically and route them to the right people
- They provide leadership with enterprise-level visibility without requiring constant reporting from stores
- They create an auditable record of timelines, actions, and accountability
The value isn't the software itself. It's the operational clarity that comes from treating title status the same way you already treat inventory status: as something that should be visible, measurable, and managed systematically.
Why Groups That Address This Early Benefit
The dealership groups that implement systematic title visibility before they're forced to tend to see three advantages:
Faster capital movement
When exceptions surface earlier and timelines are consistently enforced, funding clears faster. This is not dramatic. It is typically a 2-4 day improvement on average that materially improves cash positioning.
Reduced operational friction
The time currently spent tracking down title status at both the store and group level drops significantly. That effort is redirected away from manual follow-ups and toward higher-value operational work.
Stronger lender positioning
When negotiating floorplan terms or discussing volume capacity, the ability to demonstrate systematic control over title timelines is a tangible advantage. Lenders notice operational discipline and factor it into risk assessment.
More importantly, groups that address this proactively avoid addressing it reactively, after a lender raises concerns, after a state audit surfaces issues, or after accumulated delays become visible enough to require executive attention.
The Central Question
Regional consolidation will continue. Groups will keep acquiring stores in the same markets to achieve operational efficiency. Back-office functions will keep getting centralized and standardized.
The question is whether title processing, the function that most directly controls how quickly funding clears and cash becomes available, will remain fragmented across individual stores with limited group-level visibility, or whether it will receive the same operational infrastructure that already exists for inventory, receivables, and floorplan management.
For single-point dealers, informal coordination still works. For groups operating 10, 15, 20+ rooftops, systematic visibility isn't optional anymore. It's table stakes for operating efficiently at scale.
The groups that recognize this early, and build or implement the operational layer that creates this visibility, move capital faster, reduce friction, and operate with greater confidence as regulatory scrutiny and margin pressure continue to increase.
That's not a warning about collapse. It's a straightforward observation about operational infrastructure in a consolidating industry.
