Bentley dealership opens in downtown Sarasota

It’s official: Sarasota is now home to a Bentley dealership. 

The highest of high-end car brands held a shiny grand opening event for its downtown Sarasota showroom Thursday. In addition to local Bentley owners, executives with Bentley Motors Americas and Dimmitt Automotive Group, the Tampa Bay auto powerhouse that brought the franchise to town, attended the grand opening. Guests included Dimmitt officials and Bentley Motors Americas President Mike Rocco.

At 1518 State Street, the dealership has been a luxury auto hotspot since 2015, when Dimmitt opened The Sarasota Studio, selling vehicles from McLarens to Rolls-Royces. The multimillion-dollar investment to become an official Bentley dealer came together over the past few years, Dimmitt CEO Scott Larguier previously told the Business Observer.

Rocco, in an interview at the event, says Sarasota is a prime market for the brand, which has other franchises in tony places like Naples, Palm Beach and Greenwich, Connecticut. The Sarasota dealership is also one of four new ones for Bentley across North America, with the others in San Antonio, Texas; Santa Barbara, California; and suburban Toronto. 

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“Florida is the No. 1 Bentley market in the world,” Rocco says. “This was a natural progression to open in Sarasota.”

The dealership, says Bentley Sarasota General Manager Joshua Litton, isn’t just unusual for its high-price vehicles, which can run into the mid six-figures. It’s also a rare Bentely in a downtown setting, joining bigger cities with an urban dealership, like New York and Chicago. Like the Bentley dealerships there, the Sarasota location will have an off-site service center. That will be off 17th street, about 1.5 miles away; customers will drop vehicles off at the downtown facility. 

“It’s a really cool niche we have here,” Litton says. “It’s more like an art studio than a car dealership.” 

One of the biggest challenges in the luxury car industry, where prices for cars start at $207,000, is to grow the potential buyer pool, says Rocco. Bentley has been doing that by introducing new models and features that cater to a younger demographic, one he calls more aspirational and is maybe upgrading from say, a Mercedes to a Bentley. 

Rocco projects Bentley sales in North America, where it has dealerships from Canada to Chile, will be flat in 2026 over 2025 — something he considers a win given the litany of volatile macro-forces out of its control like tariffs, gas prices, the stock market. The anomaly, he adds, seems to be the Covid era, where demand across all brands in the auto industry far outstripped supply. “We’re not back to that,” he says. “We are healthy, but not robust."