Repo Vending Machines Taking Over
[Continued From Yesterday]
When GLBA came down in ‘99, we were told how we’d recover cars. We were told how to store data, how to protect privacy, how to document, how to report. And we did it. We adapted. We adjusted. But while we were out here upgrading our operations, somewhere along the way, the lenders got bold.
They didn’t stop at telling us how to do the job—they started telling us how much the job was worth.
And like a frog in boiling water, we stayed in the pot. A lot of agency owners thought, “Better to take this deal than lose the account.” So we kept nodding along. “Yes sir, $275 is just fine. No, we don’t need storage fees. Mileage? Who needs that? Keys? We’ll eat that too.”
And now here we are, 25 years later, under a system where they dictate the terms, the timelines, and the take-home pay. Let’s call it what it is: corporate overreach.
You’ve probably felt it, whether you’re new to this game or pushing 50 years in it. Big lenders—banks, finance companies, captives—are treating recovery agents like vending machines. Push a button, get a repo. Don’t ask questions. Don’t submit line-item invoices. Don’t try to charge fairly. Just shut up and accept your flat rate and thank them for the privilege.
Meanwhile, compliance requirements grow. You’re expected to run background checks, fingerprint your agents, install $8,000 security camera systems, fence your lots, encrypt every byte of data, train, retrain, audit, document, and digitally report—all while eating insurance premiums that climb higher every year.
And now, to make things even more “efficient,” they shove you under a forwarding agency. Let’s just call those what they are—middlemen with Excel sheets and commission cuts. They get their share, and you get what’s left.
It’s no wonder we’re watching good operators shut their doors. You can’t pay $5,000/month for your insurance and another $8,000 for your trucks and then get a flat $300 per recovery for a profit of a dollar or two.
And don’t even start on personal property. We’re spending unpaid hours sorting, boxing, logging, and storing everything from baby clothes to old cheeseburgers because someone at corporate legal is afraid of a lawsuit—and we’re not getting a dime for it.
So here’s the question: how long are we going to keep pretending this is sustainable?
Because let’s be honest—this isn’t just a compliance problem. This is a business model problem. Lenders have overreached to the point where recovery companies aren’t just underpaid; they’re unviable. The only reason some shops are still in business is sheer grit—or because they’ve figured out a few survival tricks.
They’ve found niches: specialized collateral, direct relationships with credit unions, skip tracing, field calls, even branching into private party tows or secured transport.
The core issue remains: lenders treat repossession like a liability instead of a professional service, and they’ve boxed us in so tight we’re barely breathing.
Here’s the part they won’t admit: they need us. For all the dashboards and dashboards-for-the-dashboards they’ve built, no lender is sending their VP of Risk Management out at 3 a.m. to knock on a debtor’s door. They need people with experience, instincts, equipment, guts, and grace under fire. They need someone who knows how to recover a $95,000 Escalade without it turning into a lawsuit—or a crime scene.
So maybe it’s time to remind them.
Maybe it’s time to stop accepting contracts that kill our margins. Time to stop letting forwarding agents set the bar. Time to start billing fairly for mileage, dollies, key cuts, after-hours recoveries, storage, and all the other things we were told to pretend didn’t cost anything.
We didn’t get here overnight, and we won’t fix it in a week. But every shop owner reading this has the power to not sign that bad contract. To not absorb another cost. To pick up the phone and call smaller lenders who still understand the value of a relationship—and who are still willing to pay for a job done right.
The banks think we’ve forgotten who we are. Remind them.
Dave Branch
