Good afternoon, and welcome to the Carvana Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Mike Levin, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thanks so much. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us on Carvana's Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Please note that this call will be simultaneously webcast on the investor relations section of the company's corporate website at investors.carvana.com. The second quarter shareholder letter is also posted on the IR website. Joining me on the call today are Ernie Garcia, Chief Executive Officer, and Mark Jenkins, Chief Financial Officer. Before we start, I would like to remind you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including, but not limited to, Carvana's market opportunities and future financial results that involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here. A detailed discussion of the material factors that cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements can be found in the Risk Factors section of Carvana's most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. The forward-looking statements and risks in this conference call are based on current expectations as of today. Carvana assumes no obligation to update or revise them, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise. Unless otherwise noted on today's call, all comparisons are on a year-over-year basis. Our commentary today will include non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics for our reported results can be found in our shareholder letter issued today, a copy of which can be found on our investor relations website. Now with that said, I'd like to turn the call over to Ernie Garcia. Ernie? Thanks, Mike, and thanks, everyone, for joining the call. The second quarter was a landmark quarter for Carvana, and one that will always play a central role in our story. It was the first quarter we delivered over 100,000 cars to our customers. It was our first quarter of over $3 billion in revenue. It was the first quarter we achieved $5,000 total GPU. It was the first quarter we hit $100 million EBITDA, and it was our first quarter of positive net earnings. It was also the first quarter we made the Fortune 500 list. To top it all off, we're now one of the four fastest companies to ever make the list organically, along with Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Those are some pretty great headlines, and they demand that we take a step back for a minute to put it all in context. Five years ago, the year before we went public, we sold 18,000 cars in the full year. We just sold over five times that many in a single quarter. Five years ago, our total GPU was $1,000. This quarter it was $5,000. Five years ago, we lost $0.25 for every dollar of revenue we made. This quarter, we made money for the first time. That's a lot of progress in a short amount of time. When we evaluate that progress, sometimes we all have a tendency to zoom in too far and miss what really makes it all possible. I want to try to tell the simplest version of our story that I can. When we started eight and a half years ago, we were a bunch of ambitious kids with a shocking amount to learn. With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear we had no idea what we were getting into. We did know a couple things. We knew customer preferences were changing. We knew technology was evolving. We knew the traditional way of buying a car had changed less than it should have. We believed we could do better for our customers. We knew that we were working for them, and we had a plan. We also knew we had a great team. We knew how to get the best out of each other, we knew how to spot people that could make us better, we knew how to have fun, we believed in what we were doing, we knew we could figure out the rest along the way, and we didn't know how to quit. Those were important things to know. That simple knowledge got us to today, and today is a pretty good day. Along the way, we've learned a lot. One of the important lessons is that everything worth doing is hard. Doing worthwhile things means there are often more hard days than easy ones. From here, I hope we don't get complacent. I hope we keep fighting. I hope we take on the hard days and keep doing things worth doing. I hope we keep learning, and I hope that we never let the new lessons crowd out the things that we knew at the beginning. It seems like that might be the classic mistake that people make over time. I hope we avoid it, and I believe that we will. If we do, our future is bright. The things that were true at the beginning are all still true today. Customer preferences will always change, and technology will always evolve. As a result, there will always be opportunity. We're nowhere near realizing the potential that we saw from the beginning, and additional potential reveals itself all the time. We'll keep chasing it, and as long as we keep our eyes open wide enough, we'll never catch it. The march continues. Mark. Thank you, Ernie, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Q1 was a record quarter for Carvana. We set company records across many key financial metrics and made significant progress toward our long-term goals. Retail units sold in Q2 totaled 107,815, our first quarter over 100,000 units, and an increase of 96%. Total revenue was $3.3 billion, an increase of 198%. This strong growth came despite operational constraints we faced during the quarter. Total gross profit per unit was $5,120 in Q2, the highest level in company history. It increased $2,394 year-over-year and $1,464 sequentially. Since Q2 2020 was impacted by COVID-19, I will focus my remaining commentary on sequential changes. Retail GPU was $2,022, an increase of $811. Our growth in retail GPU was primarily driven by four factors. One, increased buying cars from customers. Two, an appreciating retail market pricing environment, which was partially offset by higher wholesale acquisition prices. Three, optimizing our vehicle mix and pricing to match our production capacity and available inventory goals. And f our, moving beyond the majority of the COVID-19 related transitory costs we experienced in Q4 and Q1. Wholesale GPU was $547, an increase of $320. This was driven by record gross profit per wholesale unit sold of $1,254 and record wholesale unit volume. Record gross profit per wholesale unit sold was primarily driven by strong industry-wide wholesale pricing. Increased wholesale unit volume came from growth in buying cars from customers. Other GPU was $2,551, an increase of $333. This sequential increase was driven by a positive impact of higher industry-wide vehicle prices on average loan size, and another strong quarter of execution by our finance team. EBITDA margin was positive 3.4%, an improvement from negative 6.2% in the prior period. We achieved our second quarter of positive EBITDA and our first-ever quarter of positive net income. On July 1st, we upsized our inventory floor plan facility by $500 million- $1.75 billion, bringing total liquidity resources to nearly $2 billion, giving us significant flexibility to execute our plan. We are executing well and remain focused on building our network and increasing our production capacity to meet demand. This quarter, we've demonstrated significant progress on these fronts, but our rapid growth in both retail units and buying cars from customers led to strains throughout our operational chain that we are also focused on alleviating. In Q2, we grew average weekly vehicle production by 20% sequentially. This increase was driven by additional staffing efforts and the opening of our 13th IRC near Cleveland, Ohio. Across these 13 IRCs, our total annual production capacity is approximately 750,000 units at full utilization. We remain on track to open eight additional IRCs by the end of 2022, bringing our total capacity at full utilization to over 1.25 million units. Looking forward, we expect to complete a record year on retail units, revenue, total GPU, and EBITDA margin in 2021. We expect retail unit growth to continue to be governed primarily by our operational capacity. In the second half, we expect revenue growth to be more closely aligned with retail unit growth as we move beyond prior year comparison periods that were most impacted by COVID-19. We expect total GPU over $4,000 for the full year, significantly exceeding our mid-$3,000s outlook at the beginning of the year and marking our eighth consecutive year of substantial gains. Finally, given the demand we are seeing, we plan to continue to invest in the business, both to catch up with current demand and to prepare for growth in 2022 and beyond, leading to a typical seasonal pattern in SG&A per retail unit sold in the second half and close to break even EBITDA margin for the full year. We are extremely proud of the progress we have made as a company over the last several quarters, navigating the COVID-19 pandemic and the unique environment, all while delivering rapid growth and managing through operational constraints. Zooming out, our results relative to the industry leave us more optimistic than ever about our long-term model and path toward our goal of delivering more than 2 million retail units per year and becoming the largest and most profitable auto retailer. Thank you for your attention. We will now take questions. Thank you. We will now begin the Q&A session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using the speakerphone, please pick up the handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Also, a note, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Our first question comes from Zach Fadem of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Good afternoon, and congrats on the progress. It's been two and half years now since you gave your $4,000+ long-term GPU target and 8%-12% EBITDA margin. If you think about all the impressive progress you've made, particularly with $5,000+ GPU today, and then you think about all the ways to take profitability structurally higher, added scale, ancillary services, maybe a marketplace offering, curious how you would frame today the long-term guideposts for the business and to what extent it's now fair to assume that they could be higher than you initially thought in 2018? Sure. Well, let me start with, I think that model that we put out in late 2018 was built on deep structural forces inside automotive retail. We did a lot of work trying to understand what normalized margins are across all the different products and what different groups were able to achieve. I think that it's pretty deep and foundational, so we feel really good about that model. Let me start there. I think we've undoubtedly made a ton of progress. I think if you look at 2016, the year before we went public, we had a $1,000 GPU. We just had $5,000 for the full year. We're expecting $4,000+. That's obviously a lot of progress, and it's happened across every single 1 of the line items. We've also made a lot of progress in some of the expense line items as well, as we've continued to make progress there while we're simultaneously growing. I do think that things look really good there. We feel like it's a bit early to update the long-term model, given that this is the first quarter that we've been inside t he long-term gross margin target. I think we want to stick with that model, but we're obviously extremely pleased with the progress we've made so far. Got it. On the pricing environment, obviously a big tailwind today for both the top line and gross profit per unit. As we look to the second half of the year and anticipate some softening in the wholesale and likely retail market, curious, first of all, if you could talk about where you think pricing is headed, and then can you talk us through just what to expect in terms of the sales and gross profit outlook if the pricing environment were to soften? Would appreciate the color there. Sure. Let me start by trying to characterize the environment. I do think what characterizes this environment is very rapid vehicle price appreciation in both the wholesale market and the retail market. It's unlike anything that I've at least ever seen in my career. I think we've seen very dramatic price appreciation. Now in a normalized environment, that doesn't have huge implications for margin. Generally speaking, the gap between wholesale and retail markets are fairly stable. As price levels move up or down, both markets move in tandem, and you don't see super dramatic differences. I think what's unique now is the change happened so quickly. I also think many different acquisition sources for vehicles perform differently.;; If you look at many franchise dealers, for example, that are buying many cars off lease or buying many cars off trade-in, you've seen pretty dramatic increases in margin. If you look at some independents that are heavily reliant on just the auction market, you're generally seeing a deterioration in margin despite the increase in price environment, because wholesale price have moved up faster than retail price have moved up. I think what's unique in this environment is the speed with which things have moved, and then the way that that has played out differently across different vehicle acquisition channels. For us, we've built this channel of buying cars from customers that has performed very well for us over a long period of time. We've made continual high quality progress in both the number of cars we're buying, the cars we're buying relative to retail sales, and the profits that we're making on cars that we buy from customers. I think that channel was especially valuable in this environment, where auction spreads collapsed so much. I do think that there was something of a tailwind that we experienced there. Sizing that precisely is difficult. Associating that precisely with the ASP movements is also difficult because I do just think that these are abnormal moves that we're seeing right now. I think that it also led to another kind of interesting impact that has implications for the remainder of the year and our overall financial performance. What that was is because vehicle prices were appreciating so quickly, there were more customers that were willing to sell their car, interested in selling their car in this environment than in many other environments. That led to record increases in the number of cars that we were buying from customers, stated anyway, in absolute terms or relative to cars that we were selling to customers. We saw a lot of volume there. That did drive some expense. That expense was more than offset by the margins that we were able to realize on those cars. That also led to constraints across the business, which showed up in a little bit higher SG&As than we probably would've otherwise experienced as we've tried to catch up to the demand that we're seeing. Because a lot of times those kind of incremental levers that you pull are a little more expensive than the levers that you pull if you are able to move in a more orderly fashion. I think those are all the things that we feel like are unique in this environment, are moving. I think it is difficult to precisely call the way that will all unwind and unfold in the back half of the year. Our best estimates are taken into account in the outlook we provided. Thank you. Our next question is from Sharon Zackfia of William Blair. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Good morning, it's been a long day. Good afternoon and congratulations on profitability. I guess a question on how consumers are dealing with the pricing environment. Are you seeing any increased balk at prices? Are you having to adjust your inventory mix at all? Is there any kind of change in the average credit that you're seeing? I think, in general, the adjustments that we've made have been relatively subtle, and they've been more focused on trying to alleviate constraints, and trying to be able to grow inventory faster than they've been driven by differences that we're seeing in different demand pockets. I think in general, we feel like we've got more demand than we've been able to satisfy across all demand pockets. We've made some subtle changes in the mix of cars that we're buying to try to get them through the reconditioning centers faster so that we can scale inventory more quickly. Other than that, nothing too dramatic. On the credit front, I think across the industry, there's been high-quality credit performance. The loans that we originate, we've seen the same, but we do sell those loans off. The direct impact of that after the moment of sale is not something that flows through our financial statements. Thank you. Our next question is from Ron Josey of JMP Securities. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks for taking the question. Great quarter, guys. Ernie, I just wanted to ask. I think we're a quarter into launching in the Pacific Northwest. Just as you launch newer markets, and Carvana is now what, 75%, 80% of the population in terms of reach, just talk about the benefits of awareness that comes with these newer markets. In other words, it's easier now to launch new markets. You're seeing that every single new market that you launch. When you open up a whole new corridor like the Pacific Northwest, talk to us more about how the brand has reacted there. That'd be helpful. Thank you. Sure. I think we're continually building the brand out. I think if you look even at our website traffic, for example, it grew 25% quarter-over-quarter and very significantly year-over-year, more than 100% up year-over-year. I think that's at least a reasonable measure of the brand that we're building, and I think that we still probably remain in relatively early innings of building that brand. I think as we've discussed in the past, the way that we like to think about that is step one of building a brand is generating awareness, step two is generating understanding of what you do, and step three is generating trust. I think we're making positive headway all the time in all those different dimensions. We're still just an eight-and-a-half-year-old company that's growing very fast. Even in this last quarter, we sold over 100,000 cars. When you look at that relative to the size of the market, that was still roughly 1% national market share. I think it's still very early days. Undoubtedly, the progress that we're seeing in building brands does help us. We've seen these trends across time where our newer cohorts ramp faster than older cohorts. We continue to see that. All the other trends we've seen across cohorts, we continue to see. We're obviously seeing very rapid market share increases across all of our cohorts that are supporting the growth that we're seeing. I think what's most important now is just continuing to grow and then getting the positive feedback that shows up across the model through that growth by being able to have more inventory available for our customers, faster delivery times for our average customers. I think adding the Pacific Northwest was the last big chunk of the U.S. that we weren't connected to. Connecting that up is a big deal. Now we've just got fill-ins to do from here. Then we've just got to keep scaling. Great. Thank you, Ernie. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from Brian Nagel of Oppenheimer. Please go ahead. Hi, good afternoon. Great quarter. Congratulations. Thank you. The question I have, you talk again, despite the utter strain in the quarter, to the degree to which sales were still held back by some supply constraints. I guess the question I have there is, how did that progress through the quarter? As you exit the quarter, how well is your supply running against the demand? I think we probably, through the quarter for the most part, got progressively more constrained, and I think the driver of that is what we discussed earlier in the call, which is we saw so much growth in our offering of buying cars from customers. We grew retail units by 17% quarter-over-quarter, but we grew very dramatically in the number of cars that we bought from our customers, and that is really what led to increasing constraints. That was hard to foresee, and we weren't prepared for that degree of growth that quickly. I think that's what led to increasing constraints, and those constraints can show up across the business. Just because they're driven by buying cars from customers doesn't mean that's the only impact they have. When customers are selling their car to us, they're calling in, and they're talking to advocates. There's market ops going up and picking out those cars. We've got the logistics network that's involved with that. As we see growth in any part of the business, it generates constraints across the rest of the business. I do think we saw those constraints show up. I also think that this is a relatively difficult environment to alleviate constraints, but we've made a ton of headway that we're extremely excited about. For perspective, in July, we increased our average weekly hiring class by about 20% versus what we saw in the average of Q2. We're extremely proud of that. The speed of that move is really strong. The team's done a tremendous job just leaping to action and trying to get back in front of this. I think this has been a tough environment to do it. I think that's a testament to the quality of opportunity that we offer to applicants that are looking to come to Carvana. I think it's a testament to the career pathing that we've built over time, and a testament to the team that's been ramping up very quickly. I think we're making a lot of progress. We're extremely focused there. For the last year, we've been talking about the constraints of inventory, and we've been working hard to alleviate that. This last quarter, we grew inventory, which was exciting. We would like to grow it a lot more from here. The benefits of alleviating that constraint to a degree, as well as the massive growth that we saw in buying cars from customers led to constraints in other places, and now we got to get to work alleviating those, and I think we're well on our way. That's very helpful. I appreciate it. My My follow-up question, I just need a little bit of thinking, but this is related to market share. Clearly the Carvana model's been capturing share in the space for some time now. The question is, as the economy starts to pull out of COVID, obviously it's still a very fluid situation, but are you seeing with your model increased market share opportunities, maybe as a result of some less efficient retailers having struggled further through the crisis? Sure. I think there may be some very high-level macro trends that result from the crisis and persist that have some impacts on the opportunity. I think that that's very secondary to just what we can do as a company. I think a useful way to think about how things are moving is so far in the first half of the year, roughly speaking, sales volumes across the industry have been roughly flat to 2019. That just gives you a sense of where we are. Obviously, they dropped in 2020, and they've come back, and they're level to 2019 right now, give or take a little bit. In that time, we've increased our population coverage by about 21%, but we've increased sales by more than 2.5x. We're clearly taking very significant market share. I spoke earlier a bit about the cohorts. If we look at our individual markets or cohorts, t hose continue to ramp up very nicely. The trends that we've seen are in place there. We now have a handful of markets that are over 3% market penetration, including some of our oldest and most mature markets. I think that's all really exciting, and that's all happening in the context of us being heavily constrained right now. I think the opportunity is really, really large. We feel like as long as we keep delivering great customer experiences and executing and growing, that's going to be the primary driver of our growth. Some of the macro factors you pointed to may also kind of push in our direction a bit, but we think it's mostly about the customer experiences we deliver and our own execution. Our next question is from Rajat Gupta of JPMorgan. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks a lot. Thanks for taking the question, congrats on the strong quarter. Just the $2,000 retail GPU number, is there any way to unpack that a little bit, in terms of how much of that is temporary versus structural improvements that you might have seen in the business that might sustain, not just in the second half but into next year and beyond? Just as a follow-up on the SG&A leverage, you talked about some of the incremental transaction-related costs due to more sourcing. In terms of just looking at the fixed cost leverage, if I just look at the comp and benefits and the other SG&A buckets, none of those buckets seem to grow more than the number of units you've grown over to Q 2019. The question there is do you feel like you're having to do a lot more hand-holding of the customer during the transaction that you may have liked? I'm just curious how that's going and how that's progressed over the last couple of years. Really, when can we see that fixed cost leverage start coming through in the model? Thanks. Sorry for the long question. Sure, great. Let me start by taking the retail GPU question, then we'll move on to the SG&A question. On retail GPU, we had our first quarter over $2,000 retail GPU. We've come close a couple of times before. I think we've done $1,850 before and $1,700, not including adjustments also in 2020. The $2,000 is a record for us. I think if we think through the drivers, I think maybe it's helpful to think through it sequentially from Q1. The biggest driver there was certainly the performance buying cars from customers. Ernie talked a little bit about that, we had a great quarter for buying cars from customers. Set record volume, both in an absolute sense and as ratios to retail units. That was a big driver. There were several other factors that drove retail GPU, as we compare to Q1. Those include, we think there was a net tailwind from the appreciating retail environment, that was certainly partially offset by rapidly rising wholesale prices. As Ernie alluded to, I think, we haven't seen when we look out across the industry, dealers who rely heavily on auction or have a higher auction share of inventory do quite as well as those that are really buying a lot of cars off lease and off trade-in. We do think there was some impact there. In addition, we made some vehicle mix and pricing optimizations, doing things like trying to buy cars that we think could get through the reconditioning centers more quickly, for example. Finally, we did finally move beyond the transitory costs or the majority of the transitory costs that we experienced in Q4 and Q1. Those costs being related to COVID-19, particularly the later waves in Q4. I think when you put all that together, I think we feel really great about our retail GPU progress. Buying cars from customers continues to be a strong driver of the improvements in the business. It's something we're going to look to continue to do going forward. Obviously excited about our progress. I'll stop there on retail GPU. Moving to your question on SG&A. I think there's several drivers of our investment in SG&A. As we take a narrow view into Q2, there's a few things I'd point to. The first is that we bought significantly more cars from customers in Q2 than we did in the prior quarter, and there are expenses associated with that. Obviously there's big selection and GPU benefits associated with it as well. There's also expenses associated with that. Looking at SG&A on a per retail unit basis doesn't necessarily capture the investment that we're making to drive the business of buying cars from customers as well. That's point one. Point two is we are absolutely investing for the future. That investment takes a couple of different forms. First, we're already preparing for 2022. We're a large business that's growing at extremely fast rates, and what that means is you have to plan ahead to ensure that you have put the necessary infrastructure into place to be able to satisfy very large amounts of demand at large scale. We're already investing for 2022. That's a component of it. Finally, I would say we're also investing for the long term. As Ernie alluded to in some of his prepared remarks, we see opportunities everywhere in the business. I think opportunities to improve the customer offering, opportunities to drive additional revenue in GPU by making the business more efficient. I think there are many, many places where over a multi-year horizon, we see very significant opportunities, and we're going to invest in those opportunities. We think it's the right thing to do for the business and for our long-term shareholders. Those would be the three points that I would make on SG&A. Our next question is from Michael Montani of Evercore ISI. Please go ahead. Hey, good evening, and thanks for taking the question. Congrats on the quarter. I just wanted to ask about on the GPU front, maybe one way to come at it would be $1,500 step-up sequentially, so sort of a 40% improvement versus 1Q. If you do the same kind of math versus 2019, 2Q stepped up $750, which was like a 30% increase. Does the incremental 10% relate basically to the price appreciation in the market? Is that kind of a fair way to think about it? I think probably when you're thinking about margin, thinking about it in dollars instead of percentage terms is probably a better way to think about it. I think generally speaking, margins move more in dollars than they do in percentage terms across the industry. I would start there. I think there's a lot that is different this year than 2019. I think the thing that we would point to that is the biggest by a long way is just buying cars from customers. We just saw a massive increase in the number of cars we're buying from customers and in the profitability of buying cars from customers. I think that flowed through. I think I want to be careful to not be too repetitive with the GPU answer that Mark just provided. I think everything that he outlined is also correct, and I think you can look back at how some of those line items have moved historically and what some of our different high water marks have been and get a sense of what the size of some of those impacts might have been. I think that's probably the best I can do to try to be helpful there. Maybe to follow up on that, I guess, in terms of the second half outlook for the GPU, it seems to be implied like $3,500-$3,700 in the back half. I guess I just want to understand, how much of that is sort of normal seasonality, would you say, versus maybe some other factors we just need to be mindful of? Sure. I think at a high level, we're trying to provide you a sense of how things moved in the quarter and what we think are some of the unique drivers in the quarter. I think from here we basically expect some normalization of some of those factors paired with normal seasonality. That's taken into account in our outlook, which we raised from mid-$3,000 to over $4,000 for total GPU for the year, which is obviously a huge move for us to be making. It's something that we're extremely excited about. Our next question is from Nick Jones of Citi. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe two. One, how are you thinking about inventory levels normalizing? Is this over the next couple of quarters? Is this going to go into next year? I guess, how are you thinking about inventory availability normalizing from here? As it does normalize, there's fits and spurts of choke points in the logistics network. Do you feel like you'll be well-positioned when things do normalize and you can really meet the demand particularly in your new markets? In the past there has been times where there's been some logistical choke points. Just any thoughts on that would be great. Thanks. Sure. Maybe let me try to break that into pieces. I think what's going on at the industry level is probably most specifically driven by OEM new car manufacturing issues. I think that is likely the key driver that has led to vehicle price appreciation in both new and used. I think trying to figure out when that will normalize is a very difficult question. I think everybody's tried to do that over the last years has at least so far been wrong. I think a maybe simplified model to use for thinking about that is just that those OEMs have complicated global supply chains, which obviously include the microchips that everyone's paying close attention to, but include many other parts as well. As we've seen different waves of COVID move through different parts of the world, we've generally seen supply constraints show up in their supply chains, and that's driven vehicle price appreciation. That seems like that's probably the number one driver of the unique behavior that we're seeing in the market right now. We wouldn't want to make a specific estimate of when that's likely to normalize and how that would work through their supply chains. We think that that's probably the underlying cause. As it relates to our inventory, I think we're in a pretty simple place right now where what we want is more. We feel like we've got significantly more demand than we're able to handle, and we think that we have a good understanding of the relationships between inventory size and conversion. We would like to have significantly more inventory. We're working incredibly hard through the addition of additional inspection centers, through adding lines at inspection centers. We've got a plan to have 1.25 million production capacity by the end of next year. We're working really hard to build up more capacity and also to ramp up our production as quickly as we possibly can. I think we've seen great progress there. We grew retail units by 17% last quarter, but we were able to grow production capacity by more than that, which allowed us to build inventory. We're just going to keep moving as fast as we can there and trying to build inventory as quickly as we can. As it relates to the other constraints that emerge across the business, I think inventory is definitely the stickiest and hardest to resolve of the constraints that we can face. Once you get behind on production relative to sales, you've got work to do to catch back up to sales. While you're doing that work to catch up, you're shrinking your inventory. Once you're there, you're still just holding flat. You've got to get in front of it to build inventory. That's a long process, and then it's also obviously a very complicated operational undertaking. We've been hard at work on that one for the last year plus. I think we've made tremendous progress, especially in light of the several COVID waves that we've seen. We'll keep working on that one. On the other constraints, historically at least, we've generally been able to resolve those much faster. Those are generally not as complicated. They don't necessarily have physical facilities related to them. They don't necessarily have zoning and construction timelines associated with them. Generally, we can move faster than the other operational groups. As I said earlier, we've made a lot of progress heading into early Q3. We did get pretty behind in Q2 as we saw so much growth in both retail and buying cars from customers. I think we're making a lot of progress right now. On that one, I think our goal is also just to move as quickly as we possibly can. We think that when we look at the back half of this year, we think that sales volume is likely to be driven by the speed at which we can alleviate those constraints. It has our full attention. Our next question is from Chris Bottiglieri of Exane BNP Paribas. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I was hoping you could talk more about your third-party listing business. This seems to have really grown a lot recently. What are your early learnings from this business? Are you seeing your third-party partners change their behavior, like in terms of their business model any way to kind of adapt to this third-party model? I have a follow-up question. Well, I apologize in advance, I think we're going to probably disappoint you a little bit with our answer there. I think we've continued to make progress there. We're testing different things. We're interested by the results that we're seeing, that's why we continue to test it, we don't have anything additional to add at this time. I apologize there, hopefully we can do better on your follow-up. Gotcha. Okay. I was going to follow to that, I'll pivot and do a different angle here. Let's go to the financing business instead then. It seems like just looking at your latest deals, like the risk spreads versus the swap rates have gone lower, the agencies lower the loss expectations on your cumulative net losses. It seems like you're paying lower returns to residual buyers. I kind of want to get a sense, how much of this is a product of the environment, just lower losses and just like we're in this weird credit bubble versus how much of these recent improvements I'm speaking to, how much of that do you think is structural and kind of sticks beyond COVID-19? If there's a way you can kind of answer that or frame that. Sure. Well, I think we've made continual progress in our other GPU line item over a long period of time. I do think that that's driven by many things. I think the finance team has done a great job of both the operational finance team that optimizes our credit scoring and pricing and structuring and then the finance team, for lack of a better description, that executes our deals. I think both those teams have done an unbelievable job and driven a ton of progress. I also think the market's obviously a pretty solid financial market, so I think that all is constant, that's helpful. Then I think as a result of the environment, we've seen some increases in ASP, and then that does lead to increases in average loan sizes. Generally speaking, the premiums that we earn on those loans are percentage premiums is probably the easier way to think about it. There's probably some scaling that goes with increasing prices. I think if we take a step further back from there, this line item, along with all the other GPU line items, is a multi-year constant progression toward our long-term financial model. I think that there's a lot of really positive long-term drivers there. I think in the immediate term, trying to forecast exactly how that will evolve over the next two quarters, I think is not simple to do in light of all the different drivers that are causing it to move around. Again, that's taking into account the outlook that we provided in the shareholder letter. Our next question is from Edward Yruma of KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Hey, thanks for taking the question. Before I ask the question, I actually sold a car to you guys the other week, and it was the most painless experience I've ever had with anything with a car related. My hat's off to you. Thank you. I guess just stepping back a little bit. I know you guys are in the process of standing up, I think, eight more IRCs before the end of 2022. From a staffing perspective, I understand there's a lot of technical know-how and expertise required. How difficult is it to staff those, and maybe more importantly, staff existing centers to get productivity higher? Thank you. Sure. I think, opened up this call with everything worth doing is hard. I think nothing's easy. Don't want to make it sound easy at all, but I think that we've built a really strong team that helps us do this over time. We've built really strong recruiting functions, really strong training functions. I think we've also taken advantage of the structure of our business model to be able to offer really interesting opportunities to people out there that are looking for a new job. What I mean by that is our inspection centers are really big assembly line facilities. What's nice about that is it lends itself to building a career path inside the facility. In the rest of automotive retail, generally speaking at least, you have very skilled technicians that take any car with any problem and put it on a single lift, and they do all the work associated with that car. That requires that they have a lot of deep knowledge across everything that they would need to know about that car and any other car that might show up. What's really nice when you've got scale at these large inspection centers is we can break down those tasks into many little pieces, whether it's inspecting the car, photographing the car, different parts of the reconditioning process, figuring out what options and features are on the car so that we can merchandise it. We've got all these different steps in the process so we can really build a career path that is exciting for people. We can bring people in early in their career, and then they can build a career with us. We put a lot of effort into that, not just in building the facilities in that way, but in being able to market ourselves in that way to possible applicants and in building check-in and development milestones and compensation milestones to support that as well. I think we've really worked hard at that. That same story is true in customer care with the inside advocates, it's true in market ops with the outside advocates, it's true in logistics. We've redoubled our efforts in all those areas to really push for what we're calling careers, not jobs inside of Carvana. We're putting a ton of effort into that. I think that it's enabled us to build a foundation that is scaling very quickly. It's enabled us to build a foundation that is scaling in an environment where a lot of companies are having a tough time right now finding talent. I think that we're doing a great job, at least so far, finding talent. That's something that we're extremely proud of. Then on your comment on selling your car to us, really appreciate that. Thanks for giving us a shot. Glad it went well. You are partially responsible for the constraints that we are facing. Thanks very much. Our next question is from Mike Baker of D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead. Okay. Hi. Thanks. Two questions. One, it looks like if my numbers are right here, there's the ratio of inventory that's immediately available for sale versus the inventory that's on your website, it's about 30%. It's been actually pretty consistent in that range, although at the beginning of 1Q 2020, it was closer to 75%. I understand that's because you're having trouble with the constraints because you're sourcing the inventory so quickly. I guess the question is what's the right ratio? What should that look like? What gets it more in balance? Is it that you obviously can produce things quicker? As ASPs come down, is there a risk that fewer people are going to want to sell their car to you? Right now everyone knows you can sell your car for tons of money to you guys and your competitors. Sure. I think the most important metric is driving inventory up. That's the most important, and inventory in the eyes of a consumer is immediately available inventory. Just getting the absolute number of immediately available cars up is the most important measure. I think the ratio that you're referencing, you want to head as close to one as you can head, and you'll never get there, right? The more constrained you are, the lower you'll be because that means that you've got a larger percentage of your cars that are in the process of customers checking them out and locking them, and they might be in the purchase process. That's because you have a very high level of demand relative to the cars you have on your website. If you're constrained in logistics, then your delivery times might be a little longer than you would like. That'll show up in longer lock times and a lower proportion of inventory immediately available as well. I think as we alleviate constraints, that proportion should go up. I think the number that is most precisely important is just the absolute number of cars that are available to customers, as that's what a customer sees, and that's what represents the probability that a customer with any given set of desires finds the car they're looking for when they look through our site. Okay. That makes sense. A follow-up and a little bit different perhaps. As you guys get more mainstream and you're advertising a lot and everyone sort of, I think is learning about Carvana, are you seeing a different customer? Is it less of an early adopter? The sort of online early adopters maybe were earlier in the process. Now it's a different kind of customer. This follows up on a previous question, how does that impact how you need to staff or how you need to think about operations as people who are maybe less online savvy or sort of newer to the whole online thing start to learn about Carvana? Sure. Well, let me start with this. Our goal is to build an experience for customers that's better in ways that I think are independent of demographics or psychographics. We want to deliver to customers the best value, the best selection, the best experience. We're working very hard to build an offering that is appealing to absolutely everyone. I think from the earliest days, we saw a mix demographically and psychographically that was pretty similar to the mix of the average used car buyer in the U.S. Generally speaking, that's been pretty true across time as well. I do think there's more evidence as we get a little bit bigger that we're seeing some of the skews emerge that we probably expected from the beginning. We're seeing a little bit of a younger buyer, all else constant, not by a lot, but I think a little bit younger than any other competitor out there. We're seeing a more diverse buyer. Not by a huge amount, but more diverse than anyone else out there, at least according to our surveys. We're generally seeing a more affluent buyer directionally. I think that we do have some directional skews. They're not super strong. That would be what we're seeing from a demographic perspective. From a psychographic perspective, we've got our values, and one of those values, our next customer could be your mom. Something that we think is really important is that we build an offering that works great for, I'll use it personally, in this case, my mom. I think for this to work great for my mom, we can't be building something that's just for early adopters. I think our scale and our continued growth suggests that we're continually making progress there, and that psychographically, we are broadening our appeal. I think that's what's driving the growth that we're seeing. I think we're working hard to just continue to improve in all those dimensions that we think matter the most, which is best price, best experience, best selection. If we do that, we think that we've got an offering that's going to appeal to a lot of people over time. Our next question is from Naved Khan of Truist Securities. Please go ahead. Yeah. Thanks a lot. I might have missed it, did you share any trends from July? How the growth looks like so far into the quarter? I have a follow-up. We did not provide any color on July. We obviously provided Q2 numbers in our outlook for the remainder of the year, that's taken into account in the outlook. Okay. In terms of just us trying to model it out, obviously, there are a lot of moving parts, but is it fair to assume that at least, with the capacity increase that you want to be put in place, that's how you're thinking about growing the business for the balance of the year, kind of fulfilling that and driving your acquisition higher? We're certainly positioning to try to alleviate operational constraints as quickly as we can. I do think that we've got work to do to catch up to where we are. As I said, the growth that we saw across the business, but most specifically in buying cars from customers, was very dramatic in the quarter, and so we got behind, and now we're working very hard to alleviate that, and I think we're making a lot of progress and feel good about it. Our next question is from Seth Basham of Wedbush Securities. Please go ahead. Thanks a lot, and good afternoon. My question is also on inventory, because if I'm on the site today, I can see as many as 50,000 units listed for sale. What is the available-for-sale inventory today? Follow-up to that is what percentage of the 50,000 units are marketplace, and when do you define that as being material? Sure. First, let's start with just units that are available for sale. In the shareholder letter, we provided data for the average of Q2, which was 12,800. That was increasing throughout the quarter. The average of Q1, for perspective, was 9,300 cars that were immediately available for sale. We're on an upward trend there, and we expect to continue that upward trend. Hopefully that's at least directionally helpful there. We don't break out different inventory types. I think, generally speaking, our thought on that would just be When we expect that it could materially impact our results, we'll probably spend more time discussing it. Until that time, we'll just stick with the higher-level metrics. Okay. Also it would be helpful. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead. Hopefully helpful as well. Our inventory peak in terms of total available inventory, for perspective, was approximately 25,000, immediately prior to and immediately after the onset of COVID in March of last year. Even with the inventory growth that we have seen, in Q2, we were still approximately half of the peak that we were prior to the onset of COVID. We're obviously at much, much lower levels than we'd like to be at. I apologize, I interrupted. Please go ahead. Okay. Yeah, that's a pretty dramatic difference to 12,500 quarterly average in the second quarter versus over 50,000 that's listed for sale right now. I can't imagine that over 35,000 units are not available for sale right now, either by yourselves or by a third party. Am I missing something there? I think I would stick with the numbers we've given you on immediately available units, and then there are obviously a number of units as well that customers are checking out at any point in time, considering purchasing or maybe in transit to those customers at different locations. Hopefully that's at least directionally helpful. Our next question comes from John Colantuoni of Jefferies. Please go ahead. Thanks for my question. Just wanted to make sure I understand the interplay between production capacity and unit sales. The directional outlook says second-half unit sales will be governed primarily by production capacity, and then separately, it looks like you've ramped your operational team hiring rate by 20% in July and set a record for weekly additions in the most recent week. I know there's a lot of moving parts to ramping production aside from hiring, but should we interpret the comments about hiring to infer that unit sales could see a sizable increase sequentially in the third quarter relative to the second quarter? Thanks. Sure. Yeah. I think you should interpret the increase in hiring to suggest that we're bulking up across the sum of our operational groups and across our corporate and technology groups as well. Obviously, the vast majority of people are across the operational groups. That includes inspection centers that'll show up first in increased production capacity, which will allow us to work through the cars that we've already purchased but we have not yet produced. That will cause those cars to show up in available inventory. It will also show up in alleviating the other constraints we have across our other operational groups, where we're behind today, but working hard to catch up. Great. Thanks so much. Our next question is from Billy Kovanis of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Thanks. This is on behalf of Adam Jonas. Just one question, Ernie. From the feedback you're getting from customers, what are the one or two areas of the consumer experience where you can make the biggest improvement? Thanks. There's probably a million areas across the experience where we can make it continually better across time. If I had to pick one thing that is most important today, it's alleviating our constraints. Despite our constraints, we continue to deliver experiences that are meaningfully above anything else available anywhere in automotive retail, and we're continuing to see NPS scores that are meaningfully above anything else in automotive retail. Those constraints can lead to friction versus what we would otherwise be able to deliver if we didn't have constraints. Those constraints can show up in longer delivery times, slightly higher odds of missing a delivery time and having to reschedule it. They can show up in registration delays. They can show up in all kinds of different ways. I think, the most important thing that we can do right now is catch up to the demand that we're seeing. Because the machine that we have delivers extremely high-quality customer experiences, and it's also built in a way that it absorbs errors that we make in any given customer experience. You always make mistakes here and there, and we're built in a way to be able to absorb that as well when we're properly staffed for the volume that we're seeing. Today, we're behind. I think that would be the number one area to focus. I think, taking a longer-term lens, we've spoken before about how we have 70 plus product groups across Carvana. I think every single one of those product groups has a multi-year roadmap that is extremely exciting, with myriad improvements all over the place. I think there's a lot of things that we're investing in today to try to continually make this experience even better for customers. I wouldn't want to single any of those out, but I think there's a lot of opportunity. Helpful. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back to management for closing comments. Sure. Well, thanks everyone for dialing into the call, and thanks for your questions. To the Carvana team, we only get to have our first profitable quarter one time, and I think I always find myself thanking you on these calls, and I can always hear that it doesn't come across as completely sincerely as I wish because it's an odd venue. I hope that you hear our absolute gratitude. This is an unbelievable milestone. For those of you who've been here for a long time, there was times six, seven, eight, years ago when today was extremely hard to see. We fought a million battles together, and we figured a lot of things out, and we've continually improved. The whole time we've stayed together, we fought through COVID-19 together. We've just done so much, and I'm so proud of it. Thank you all for your contributions, and please, always remember that this just does not happen without you. All of its parts and we together make up the parts of Carvana. Thank you so much. We have a ton to be proud of. I hope you put your feet up and take a moment to be proud, and then I hope you take them down and don't let it go to your head and get your head in the right space because we've still got a lot of building to do. We've done a lot so far, and we really appreciate it. Thank you to all. Thank you. That concludes today's call. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.