November 11, 2024
Home » A Good Repo Man Is Hard To Find

Kyle Barnes is showing me how quickly he can tow a car with his repo truck.

We’re in a 4-acre auto yard at Zane Investigations in Sparks, Nevada, a repossession agency just outside Reno. Picture rows and rows of fairly new-looking SUVs and sedans on dusty gravel, like some forlorn car orphanage. They average about 35 repos a day here.

Barnes flips on the power takeoff, or PTO for short, and a loud mechanical hum provides the soundtrack to the tow truck’s boom sliding underneath a recently repossessed Hyundai Elantra. The car is off the ground in a matter of seconds.

“See, you don’t even have to get out of the truck,” said Barnes, 26. “I can do this in my sleep, man.”

Barnes has been working as a field agent here for more than three years. He said ideally, he won’t leave the truck to strap the car in more securely until he tows it a few blocks away from the owner’s address. He said he’s seen former owners approach his truck with guns four or five times.

Barnes is married and has a kid. Shockingly, his wife doesn’t love the idea of him being a repo man.

But he loves it.

“I consider myself kind of an adrenaline junkie,” Barnes said. “When you get that car and you’re taking off, and say they come running out of the house screaming at you, running at you, no matter how long you do it, it gets your heart pumping.”

The repossession industry is struggling to find enough people like Barnes. This past spring, Harley-Davidson partly blamed $53 million in credit losses on a shortage of repo agents — the people lenders hire to take away a bike or car when borrowers fall behind on their payments.

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