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I was thinking about Dealerships (having recently been looking around some for a new car) f I recall correctly, in other car tycoon games car, the player's companies seemed to "own" their dealerships.
I know in the UK most, in not all, dealerships are franchises, not owned by the car company.
I thought the franchise idea might be an interesting one and could work something like this:

- Your company has a "recruiting budget" to court new franchises
- Franchisees apply for a dealership and the player's company incurs an initial set-up charge + smaller monthly charge to keep them stocked in your merchandising materials for everyone you accept.
- Your company's brand reputation affects dealerships. The better it is the easier it is to recruit and you get more applications. The lower it is the harder it is to recruit, you either have to spend more in your budget or you get less and less applicants until it comes to a point where they start to leave you for other brands.
- The ability to try and poach franchises from other brands.
- In harder times you could look to end franchise agreements to cut costs (would need some sort of stats to see which are the lesser performing dealerships.
- random events where franchisees go bust, etc

Do you mean to recruit people to work in a dealership or to contact owners of dealerships/franchises?

I think he means people willing to franchise a dealership of your company cars. Popular brand gets more applicants, less popular makes it harder to find or people appliying or you have to buy your own dealerships.

Ohh ok so something like Caledonian Vauxhall? (Not sure if that's in more than one country)

Yep, I meant just like how whizzy put it, getting owners of garages or showrooms to be one of your authorised dealers and sell your cars.

Yup, although I,ve not heard of Caledonian Vauxhall, in my town we have Dews Vauxhall, but they also have Ford, Peugeot and Alfa dealerships too.

Hey Dev's what are your views on a dealership view? Doesn't have to be fancy maybe just a big showroom we can see the company logo we choose the name of our company and maybe some of our cars that are on sale appear on the showroom floor too?

The details of this have not been worked out yet, but I don't think we'll go into much more complexity than a generic "dealership coverage" in each region, which is affected by your regional brand awareness and such.