112 Auto Blogs

become a buy-here pay-here customer for us where we finance the loan. When that is established, we will be able to talk to them intelligently about down payments and what's required to get into the vehicle at that time.

The time frame from start to finish is about an hour or less.

It takes so long at other dealerships probably because salespeople or the manager promises them pie in the sky stuff. When the customer comes in and spends time looking around, finding what
they want, then find out what they can't get approved. So the salespeople are, shot-gunning the customer around--we call it shot-gunning--to other lenders hoping to get an approval.

 

Meanwhile, the customer sits in the showroom and waits and waits and waits and waits and waits until they either get a loan approved or they don't. And if the dealership does get it approved,
they're going to come back and tell the customer, “Well, you need $3,000 or $4,000 down.” Which is a lot more than the customer was told or expected. That happens quite a bit.

When someone comes into 112 Auto Sales, we go through the application right away and tell them exactly where they stand financially. We know right away.

And sometimes the customer is in a hurry, so they'll come in and look at a couple of cars, then leave us a deposit and say, “Call me later.” That's what we do. We'll give them the information upfront.

Despite our being a buy-here-pay-here dealership, we always try to put people out with third- party lenders because they're going to get a better interest rate from that particular bank than they will from us on a buy-here-pay-here deal. Our primary objective is to get the customer the best deal that we can get them. If and when all the banks say “no,” we say “yes.”

And at that time, when they pick out their vehicle from our inventory and then pick it up, we'll tell them, “Make your payments on time, we report them to the credit bureaus.” And a couple of years later they're able to get it into a better deal.

Filling out an application online helps speed up the deal, too.