Auto Loan Delinquency is High, So Where is All the Repossession Volume?

Take Our Poll!

EDITORIAL

Month after month and article after article we hear that auto loan delinquency is at record highs. Yet judging from some comments I’ve seen in FaceBook responding to similar articles, it makes me wonder if the delinquency is translating into new repossession assignments?

The data is there. Auto loan delinquency is the highest it’s been since before the pandemic and in many loan delinquency tranches, it’s unrivaled to any period since the downslide following the Great Recession.

We’ve published numerous stories and editorials where the high repossession volumes are creating massive storage problems including one night that Jeremy Cross had to literally stop repossession because he had no room left to store them.

These are legitimate sources, not just social media comments. Based on these, it would certainly suggest that repossession volume is near industry capacity.

But if this is the case, why aren’t we seeing any symptoms of this anywhere else? Nowhere in BlackBook’s weekly Market Insights report do they make any mention of increases in auction inventory coming from repossession activity. In fact, wholesale auction values have pulled out of their 2023 nosedive and have returned to seasonal normal.

Cox Automotive are probably the greatest auto industry experts of all, but week after week, they’re silent on the topic. The only people reporting high repossession volume are the press. But they never publish any actual statistical data.

Experian, the largest credit reporting bureau in the country, reports on the state of auto industry every month in a detailed report covering everything from average payments and balances to borrowers ages and even delinquency. But on the topic of repossession volume, they’re silent. It’s not like they don’t have the data, but I’ll get to that in a second.

Why isn’t there any empirical evidence to track repossession activity? Unlike just about every other loan attribute and consumer characteristic, no one reports any level of aggregate repossession volume.

I know how it can be done, credit reports. While not all auto lenders report credit, such as buy here/pay here dealers, almost every other regulated lender does. And every time they repossess a vehicle, they report it as repossessed on the credit report.

If the credit reporting bureaus could only share the new repossession status codes, we would have our answers. I know they can, I asked Experian.

Unfortunately, in order for them to pull this data, Experian wanted to charge me $25K. Crazy, but crazier, it would have been prohibited from selling the data in aggregate or raw data form. Both the price and terms of use made it unfeasible.

I’ve made numerous requests and suggestions that they just share it, but they just don’t seem inclined to do so. So, in the absence of any reliable statistical data, I’ll just ask you all.

While we can all agree that repossession activity is far improved from where it was just a couple of years ago, just how heavy is the repossession volume for all of you these days?