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Originally Posted by Mavrick81
Thanks for the clarification on the allocation being specific to the model, and congrats on your good fortunes on getting one accepted and built so quickly. To bad Missouri is so far away from the Northwest. I did a search around the Seattle area and most dealerships only had 1-3 on hand or in transit. I can't imagine finding a dealership with 20. I did find one with 7 and reached out. Unfortunately they are asking for $10k over MSRP. I'll keep searching, but my expectations for getting one at MSRP in my area are pretty low at this point.
Eric
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Here's what I ended up doing, it was a lot of work but I ultimately found the right dealer and they were able to obtain an allocation for me within 30 days.
1) Create a spreadsheet and list all of the Chevrolet dealers that are a reasonable distance from you.
2) Once a week, check each dealership to see how many New cars they have in inventory (including cars in transit), record that number.
3) Next, tally the number of New inventory camaros they have (including those in transit), record that number.
4) Each week do the same, record the number of new inventory and number of new camaros, use a separate tab in each spreadsheet for each new week. Also calculate the % of their new car inventory are camaros and record that number.
After several weeks, you will notice a pattern. The dealerships that have the highest number of new cars, and the dealers that have the highest numbers of new camaros (and the highest % of their inventory as camaros). Pay special attention to those dealers that have the number of camaros going up and down over time (net changes week to week), that means they are turning over their camaros and getting new allocations to replace them.
I developed a scoring system. I ranked the dealers based on who had the highest # of camaros, the highest # of "net camaro changes" as defined above, and those that had the highest % of camaros in their total new inventory. Most of the dealers in my area had only 0-4 camaros at any one time, a couple of outliers had 6. The key was the movement over time and if they were getting new camaros. Some dealerships I tracked had 0 camaros for months on end.
I did this over several months, and when I scored them I made a top 10 dealer list. Then I started reaching out to my highest ranked dealers and asked if they are they selling camaros at MSRP, and what they required for a deposit. I also asked how often they got Camaro allocations and if they had any coming up. I contacted my top 3 dealerships and landed on the one where I ultimately ordered was lucky enough to get that allocation.
In the end, I was able to hedge my bets on what I figured would be the "best" dealers in my area based on my scoring, but I also realize I got lucky too. I knew I couldn't always count on dealers being honest, so I tried to base it in part on the numbers I tracked.