How Long Does a Used BMW 3 Series Take to Sell?

Days on lot is the number of calendar days between a vehicle being added to a dealership's inventory and its recorded sale date. That clock starts at intake, so on units that need work it includes reconditioning time. We exclude vehicles with no entry date, sales recorded before the entry date, and anything over 730 days — those are data-entry artifacts, not slow-moving inventory.

We report the median, not the average. Turn time has a long right tail: a handful of units that sit for a year or more drag the mean well above what a normal car does. Across every vehicle we track, the mean is 67 days while the median is 39. The median answers the question a dealer is actually asking, and the quartiles show the spread around it.

These figures come from aggregated, de-identified activity across independent dealerships that use AutoRaptor. We report only totals across many dealerships, never an individual dealership's results. No customer records, buyer information or dealership names are included.

We publish a model only at 150 or more sales, and a model year only at 40 or more. We do not publish gross profit figures, because the price fields in our data are incomplete and any margin we reported would be wrong.

Average list price is the advertised price at the time of listing, not necessarily what the buyer paid — the field that records the actual sale price is populated on a small fraction of sales, too few to publish. We exclude listings under $500 or over $200,000 as data-entry artifacts.

*Est. holding cost is BMW 3 Series's median days on lot multiplied by $33, the industry-wide daily floorplan cost per vehicle reported in the NIADA 2025 Used Car Industry Report — an external benchmark, not a figure derived from AutoRaptor data. It's a reminder that a slower-turning model doesn't just sell later, it costs more to hold.