(continued from Part 1)

The misperception about dealers who will actually sell a vehicle to you because they want you to fail so that they can repossess it and resell it, is unfortunately not a myth.

It’s derived from the exact thing we were just talking about. Back in the days when a dealer had a car, they had $2,000 in it, they could get $2,000 and finance the rest of their own profit…

Once upon a time, that happened.

But we don’t operate that way. We can’t. We handle much higher-end vehicles and take such a low down payment, we can’t afford to do that.

We make money when you are successful and pay that loan off. We get a little investment on the front end, and then make our money when the loan is paid off. We set you up to be successful from start to finish.

We make good money when you pay the vehicle off or decide to trade. If I can sell five, six, seven cars to your mom, dad, sisters and brothers and friends, that’s where we’ve been successful.

From an ethical perspective, we don’t want to sell you a car with the purpose of repoing it. That wouldn’t be smart, especially at Barrett Motors because we sell higher-end, nicer vehicles. It just doesn’t make sense to do it that way. (Check out our inventory)

Not only that, when we have to repo a car, it typically severs the relationship with you. That’s the last thing we want to do.

Our collections department and finance team are trained to help you through whatever problem you’re going through. Sometimes it’s payments you are struggling to make, or it’s insurance issues or a job change—things like that.

We try to give you every opportunity to do the right thing and make your payments. If you just can’t, we actually use credit counselors and try to help you through whatever problem you’re having. For the deal to end in a repossession severs that relationship that we tried so hard to cultivate and keep alive.

In addition, that customer will probably never buy a car from us again—and we’d probably never sell them one. So we don’t want that. I want the opportunity to sell you dozens of cars to your family and friends and kids.

In fact, with several customers, we have three generations of car buyers.

I think a bigger testimony is this: A lot of our customers came to us looking for help with financing when nobody else would help them because their credit was shot. Since then, they have built their credit back up to where they can go to a franchise dealership and buy a brand spankin’ new vehicle, but they don’t. They could buy whatever they want, but they still come to us not only for the service that we provide, but also out of gratitude because we helped them when nobody else would.