Miller said the Advantage website will be upgraded for customers to rent, sell and buy used vehicles.īill Fields of Dealer Solutions Mergers and Acquisitions, a dealership buy-sell firm based in Markham, Ontario and with a U.S. 'What we're able to do is take the rental car, put it on a truck in the morning, get it into the service department, get it reconditioned and by the end of the day, have it ready for sale at the dealership,' Dan Miller said. The company plans to use dealership service departments to recondition rental cars for used-vehicle sales.

It has rental car businesses in both Atlanta and Orlando, for example. Sandy Miller is Dan Miller's father.ĭan Miller said he wants Orlando Rentco to continue to acquire nonluxury brand dealerships in second-tier markets that are within a few hundred miles from its eight Advantage airport rental car locations.

Other minority owners of the GMC dealership include Mark Zurales, dealer principal and vice president of retail operations for Advantage Rent a Car and who formerly worked for dealership groups such as Walser Automotive Group and AutoNation Inc., and Sandy Miller, former CEO of Budget Group Inc. Orlando Rentco, also owned by Remon Aziz, in July 2020 bought some Advantage Rent a Car locations and assets after Advantage filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Miller said. 'We wanted to enter the retailing business so that when we sell our, what we call off-rental cars, or the rental cars that come out of the rental fleet, we wanted a way to sell those in a retail environment instead of just primarily wholesale, which we have done up to this point,' Miller told Automotive News.

Orlando Rentco, of Orlando, owns Advantage Rent a Car. The dealership has been renamed Advantage GMC of Adel, said Dan Miller, co-owner and CEO of Orlando Rentco, the majority owner of Adel Dealerco. The owner of Advantage Rent a Car has entered auto retail, buying a standalone GMC dealership in Georgia.Īdel Dealerco on July 20 bought Jerry Kelley GMC in Adel, north of Valdosta and the Georgia-Florida state line. Ed Morse, Teddy's grandfather, started the business in 1946 when he founded Morse Motors. 60 on Automotive News' list of the top 150 dealership groups based in the U.S., retailing 14,169 new vehicles in 2020. With the Donaghe acquisitions, Ed Morse now has 24 dealerships in Florida, Oklahoma, Missouri and Texas.Įd Morse Automotive ranks No. It also sold two Florida dealerships to dealer Ken Marks in late May: a Buick-GMC store and a Mazda store, both in Port Richey, Morse said. In early May, the group entered Missouri when it bought four dealerships. Morse said the group will eventually rename the dealerships Freedom Ford by Ed Morse and Freedom Buick-GMC by Ed Morse. We're particularly excited about being able to add Ford to Texas.' It was an opportunity to increase our footprint here. But two years ago, we bought our first stores in Dallas and since then been acquiring stores in this area. 'We have obviously a huge presence in Florida because we've been there for 75 years.

'We have a presence currently in the area, and we are looking to increase that,' Morse told Automotive News. With the Greenville transaction, Ed Morse now has each of the Detroit 3 automakers represented in Texas, which CEO Teddy Morse described as 'one of the greatest truck markets in the country.' The group now has seven dealerships in North Texas and one in Durant, Okla., near the Texas border. Greenville is about an hour's drive northeast of Dallas. The Delray Beach, Fla., group acquired Donaghe Buick-GMC and Donaghe Ford, both in Greenville, from Chance Donaghe. Ed Morse Automotive Group expanded its growing Texas footprint with the purchase of two dealerships Monday.

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