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Salvage auction buyer fee take a big jump for small buyers today.

atikovi

Tie Cut
Apr 19, 2018
12
2
First Name
Ati
Just happened to check the buy fees at IAA and noticed as of Feb 1, they are starting a two tiered fee system. If you bought less than 12 units the last 12 months, your buy fee goes up like 50% depending on the sale price. For example, on a $3,000 bid, a high volume buyer would pay a $400 fee and a low volume buyer, $600. PLUS an added $148 in BS fees for bidding online and having someone bring the car out for you. They are really sticking it to the small buyers. Checked the fees at Copart and they are doing the same thing and their fees pretty much mirror IAA. Any lawyers want to take on a price fixing or collusion case, this has that written all over it.
 
I don't mean to hurt feelings here, but I am getting ready to I am quite sure. I am really passionate about this.

I am a small (relatively speaking) Independent car dealer. We sell between 300 and 400 units per year. We have employees which we pay well. We have a nice facility which we pay a lot of money to occupy. We have payroll taxes, offer some benefits, have expensive insurance premiums, and do all of the things that an employer and community supporter should do. In my small market, there are 3 franchise dealerships and 4 Independent dealers that are operating as actual car dealerships. In my small market, there are 25 licensed dealers. That means that there are 18 dealers that sell a couple a month, don't have employees, don't have expenses, don't have benefits, don't own or lease nice facilities, don't support the community, and basically just take 4 or 5 monthly deals from the 7 of us that are trying to make the industry better and do things right.

I would be willing to bet that if these auction houses you are talking about would throw their transactional headaches (pain in the ass transactions) into a pile, the majority of the headaches come from dealers that are buying less than 12 units per year. I don't blame them one bit for wanting to charge a premium to people that don't buy much from them. I also don't blame them one bit for wanting to offer a lower cost to people that do more business with them.

I am so fucking fed up with the micro sized dealers sneaking customers into the auctions and driving prices up for the rest of us. In my state, the barrier for entry into the retail automobile business is too low. We just had the cost of our dealer license double a couple years ago, and I wish it had quadrupled to drive some of these guys out of the business.

I am all for free enterprise and I understand that we all have to start somewhere. However, I don't expect the same buying power that a dealer selling 1,000 units a year has and I don't believe a dealer selling 1/10th of what I sell should have the same buying power as me. The easiest solution to the IAA/Copart issue is to buy more than 12 units per year.
 
I don't mean to hurt feelings here, but I am getting ready to I am quite sure. I am really passionate about this.
I wasn't complaining so much about the amount of the fees, although they are outrageous for both types of buyers, but what seems like collusion between the two companies to fix prices. And you can't really compare salvage auctions to regular auctions anyway. What if Manheim said they were going to charge you an extra $59 fee for a gate pass, for example. And as for some dealers bringing retail customers to the auction, my nearest Manheim auction is open to the public, albeit, in just a few lanes. I'd say dealers outbid public buyers 90% of the time anyway, so their presence has a minimal affect on prices.
 
I wasn't complaining so much about the amount of the fees, although they are outrageous for both types of buyers, but what seems like collusion between the two companies to fix prices. And you can't really compare salvage auctions to regular auctions anyway. What if Manheim said they were going to charge you an extra $59 fee for a gate pass, for example. And as for some dealers bringing retail customers to the auction, my nearest Manheim auction is open to the public, albeit, in just a few lanes. I'd say dealers outbid public buyers 90% of the time anyway, so their presence has a minimal affect on prices.

Dealers outbid the public buyers because they HAVE to. Dealers must have inventory in order to sell inventory.

I am not talking about the open lanes, I am talking about dealers that take their retail buyers into the auction to view inventory and then charge that person $250 (or some idiotically low number) for getting them into the auction. In this case, the public isn't the bidder.

What if Manheim charged a fee for ________________? Seriously? Manheim is not afraid to charge a fee. They fee us for online buying, auction access, certain seller surcharges, you name it and they charge it.

I get the price fixing thing, but don't know how it would be possible to prove collusion. For Copart to see an IAA invoice (providing the surcharge shows on the invoice) and think it is an idea they would like to implement is not collusion.