Important Steps For Agency Owners to Consider Now In a Coronavirus World

FROM THE INFORMATION DESK AT ARA

“I would encourage you: be informed – knowledge is power.” Matt Bevin

No doubt you are reading online news about the banking, auto lending, and business world’s response to the Coronavirus, and are considering how this virus will affect the repossession industry in general…and your repossession business in particular.

Some smaller businesses will have a tough time surviving a several-week or several-month interruption of repossession work. However there are steps you can take NOW to protect your agency:

1.) The SBA is offering low-interest loans to small businesses effected by the COVID-19 virus. Read about that program here: https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/disaster-assistance Even if this isn’t something you need to access now, know that this help is out there, and know where to find it. The repossession industry would most surely qualify.

2.) Contact your mortgage company, lease company, or finance company to arrange a 90 day extensions on your financial commitments (“loan forbearance”). There may come of a time when these loan extensions are mandated by the government, but this is not yet guaranteed to happen. Reading communications from the US government, there is a concern to assure long-term survival of small businesses through concessions by lenders, so this is the right environment to ask.

3.) If you work for a forwarder or a lender, make a friend in the A/R Department. The entire repossession vendor supply chain may suffer, but this would be a very inopportune time for a lender or forwarder to refuse to pay a service provider for services rendered if it became public knowledge or known to regulators.

4.) SOP Changes. ARA is in communication with many lenders and forwarders about the need for our industry to protect our membership. We are all accessing vehicle interiors constructed of hard surfaces, being driven by consumers who may or may not be infected. We are working on industry-standard policies on how personal property inventories and property releases are to be handled and will promulgate that to the industry very shortly.

5.) Fee Changes. Read #4 above. There is no time in the recent past where waiving fees on handling personal property makes less sense than now. Employees that inventory or handle personal property are legitimately at risk. Our industry needs to handle repossessed collateral on a HAZMAT basis. There is no time that better justifies charging the lending community…not the consumer…a fee for these services.

6.) Most importantly, keep calm. The panic associated with a pandemic often creates greater suffering than the disease itself. Keep in mind, too, that vehicle loans (and the vehicles themselves) are not going to disappear into the ether. When this passes, the vehicles will still be out there. Even with loan concessions by the lenders (which were common even before the crisis), the numbers of vehicles subject to repossession was extremely robust. It will be so again.

ARA represents the strongest, most experienced and professional recovery agents in our industry. Together we can weather this, and we will come out stronger still in the end.