I mean, we were doing 64% to 65% SG&A as a percentage of gross in mid-2014, 2015, 2016.If you go back and look at any of our filings, okay and today, our average store size, and that’s why Chris spoke to this idea of bigger stores have better leverage on their cost structures, that we believe there’s somewhere between 300 basis points and 500 basis points in improved SG&A that are coming from a cleaner network, meaning we have less stores that are achieving SG&A of 80% plus because we sold off 30 stores to 35 stores and we bought things what we would call in the three strongest regions, which is regions four, five, and six, primarily five and six.Okay or excuse me, four and six, which is the South Central and the Southeast, where if you remember back in ’14 and ’15, we had zero presence in the most profitable automotive retail markets in the country, which is in regions four and six.Rajat Gupta Got it.
That’s helpful. Just one last one, on the new vehicle same-store number, the minus 6%, when we look at like the overall industry, even excluding fleet it still seems to be a few 100 basis points below the industry average. Is that just because of your regional presence or within the regions, metro versus non-metro locations, where that disconnect is coming from? Just curious like, because you mentioned you were gaining market share, so it is hard to reconcile with your overall industry numbers. So any clarification on that would be helpful.Chris Holzshu Yeah, Rajat, this is Chris. So what we’re saying exactly is, we’re seeing the Western region have an outsized proportion of a declining sales volume on the new vehicle side right now, but at the same time, our market effectiveness or our representation of the brands that we represent actually gain share.So we’re getting a bigger piece of a smaller pie, which is exactly what we expect our operators to do when they focus on new vehicles.
And then the expectation after that is to focus on obviously used vehicles and our after sales business and leverage the expenses to bring more net to the bottom line, which helps us drive that SG&A number Bryan was referring to.Rajat Gupta Got it. Great. Thanks. Thanks for all the color.Operator Thank you. Our next question is coming from the line of Bret Jordan with Jefferies. Please proceed with your questions.Bret Jordan Hey, good morning guys. You talked a couple times about sort of normalized GPU environment and maybe GPU is a bit better than expected now. What is — could you sort of give us a ballpark for what a normal GPU is expected to look like? I think in the third quarter call last year, you talked about maybe back to pre-COVID levels, but what’s your expectation now?Bryan DeBoer Yeah, we’ve definitely indicated that we believe that normalized levels could be $300 to $500 better between both F&I and the vehicle gross profit, which would put us into the four — low fours with F&I.
So, we still believe that that can probably hold true. Okay and it may be on a lower base of business, but we also know that there’s still about 20% lift in the current SAAR environment, in the new car side, and there’s about a 12% lift in the used car side to get back to normal volumes and we’ll see what that looks like. But it sure looks like we’ve structurally changed some of the things in the industry to realize a normalized level that’s a little higher than where we were going into COVID.Now, I will say this, we’re not modelling a lot of that into our assumptions for 2025 and beyond because we don’t know that yet. And I think ultimately we need to see those that structural change occur before we actually start to model that.Bret Jordan Okay.
And then a quick question on the cadence of used ASPs. They’ve been declining — they had that popped or the Manheim did in February. What do you see sort of the balance of ’23 outlook unused ASPs? Is there a real downside or is the lack of new car supply going to support them?Chris Holzshu Yeah, this is Chris, I think ASPs are going to continue to moderate throughout the year, especially based on where credit quality is with consumers. It’s a market-driven phenomenon when interest rates go up, affordability issues get constrained and it flips the market a little bit and as you saw, and we talked about coming outta Q4, we saw some inventory issues that we had to work through and looking on a same store basis right now, we had, I think 26% of our inventory was aged over 60 days, coming into Q1 and that number’s down to about 12%.So we’ve had a lot of work to do to kind of right size the inventory based on kind of the market adjustments that you see.
But yeah, if interest rates kind of stabilize where they’re at, I think ASPs can moderate, especially with the lack of what we lose four million units in production over the last three years because of chip shortages and other issues that’s going to create that demand on overall use car values.Operator Thank you. Our next question is coming from the line and of Chris Bottiglieri with BNP Paribas. Please proceed with your questions.Chris Bottiglieri Hey guys. Thanks for your questions. Quick, clear one up front, what was the APR on originations this quarter?Bryan DeBoer Sorry, Chris, APR on originations? The APR was just over 9%.Chris Bottiglieri Okay. So I think last quarter you guided DFC income as 8.5% to 10% of accounts receivables. It seems like you reiterate that again this quarter.
I would think at a 9% when I look at some of your peers, they’re a lot higher than that with similar, albeit slightly lower FICO scores. So I think there’s an ability to kind of move that up, that portfolio average up. Like how do you, how do you think of the cadence from here in terms of how fast you’re willing to raise your APR and what that means to your weighted average portfolio yield over the balance of ’23?Chuck Lietz Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Chris. This is Chuck. Great question. We definitely are laser focused on our yields and making sure that as we originate loans that number one, we look at each individual contract to make sure it’s accretive using the current models for our cost of funds, risk adjusted sort of basis. And so yeah, the second thing is that we are the closest or one of the closest to the market in terms of the amount of information that we see and we put that all into how we look at originations to make sure that we can increase yields as quickly as possible without damaging the overall franchise.So we expect our yields to push up though probably still in that 8% to 10% range.