The National Independent Auto Dealers Association (NIADA) hosted its annual Convention & Expo in August. This convention gathers industry experts to share insights, trends, resources and best practices with independent auto dealership owners of all types, including franchise, independents and Buy Here Pay Here (BHPH) dealers.
We attended several seminars related to BHPH and walked away with a few key points about the state of the industry.
– Loan delinquencies remain low. While they’re rising, we haven’t seen the wave of delinquencies we expected by this point in the pandemic recovery.
– Vehicle values at auction are at an all-time high. BHPH dealers are concerned because this makes it difficult for them to get good returns on their collateral as they’re paying more for vehicles at auction but buyers’ down payments haven’t increased at the same rate. In addition, selling loans carries higher risk because of lower returns.
– Another pain point is on the repossession side of the business. Many repo companies shut down or consolidated during the pandemic, so there aren’t as many active repo agents available. This has driven up the average time to repossess a vehicle. This slower pace means that BHPH dealers are currently getting only about 40% of their vehicles back due to this slower pace.
– Also, because repossessors are challenged by having fewer available agents, a smaller number of debtors and increased GPS tampering, agents focus on easy-to-find vehicles first. The more difficult accounts without GPS data and/or inaccurate address information move to the end of the list, further delaying successful repossession.
The bottom line? Dealers need new tools to be successful. All of these challenges make the use of DRN data even more critical for repossessors and the BHPH market.
Our DRNsights platform is a great compliment to GPS by bridging the gaps in what GPS offers in terms of location data. In addition to billions of scans of historical license plate scans and more than 220 million new scans added monthly, DRN also pulls in public record data. DRNsights uses all of this data to build full vehicle stories that can help dealers and repo agents locate vehicles quickly. In fact, using DRN’s license plate recognition (LPR) data in addition to GPS can increase recovered vehicles by up to 35% in half the time.
If you’d like to learn more about how DRN can help solve collections and repossession challenges – especially during the unique circumstances brought about by the pandemic – please contact us here. We’d love to talk with you and provide a demo of how DRNsights can work for you.
