I worked at and had pot-lots for a time. Mostly they were a place to sell the crap we couldn’t make any wholesale money on. And I did a fair share of buy here/pay here financing so I had some experience with repossessing cars I had financed. Most of the time I just called the repo guy and gave him money to go get my car when the customer forgot what walking felt like. But I did a few myself.

When I was the manager at a new Honda car dealership, we didn’t do our own financing, we ran every deal through a bank one way or another. Once in a while we might in house finance an employee on a cheap car, but rarely.

We had an older Jaguar XJS V-12 convertible. We’d taken it in trade on a new Honda and since it had really low miles and was like brand new out of the box we decided we’d take a chance and put it out front and retail it. The problem with cars like that is they sit…and sit, until the one buyer in a million stumbles in and buys it. And while it sits, it slowly falls apart. The tires go flat…the battery gets dead…it starts leaking fluids… the transmissions fall out. You wouldn’t believe all the things that happen to cars, especially English cars, when they just sit there. But we decided we would keep it, and smogged it and stuck it on the front line.

It was bright red with tan leather and it was beautiful. I drove it to Sacramento and back one time. What a dreamy car it was. Smooth, heavy, comfortable, and lord that twelve-cylinder sound was sweet! It sat on the front line for a long time. We moved it when we moved the lot around and usually when we did, something would break and it would move to the shop where it would spend money and then move back out on the line where it sat…and sat.

A guy came in one Sunday evening. He was mid-fifties, dressed all spiffy, and had some young eye candy with him. She was a trophy blonde with lots of make-up, big boobs, and small clothes and they upped one of my salesmen and went out to look at the Jaguar. They took it for a drive, so I had a copy of the guy’s driver’s license. He lived in one of the little rich towns on the coast, fifty miles away. All the people I’d ever met from those little towns were pretty well off financially, so I got excited. We may have finally found that one in a million guy for the Jaguar.

The salesman wrote him up and brought me the write-up. The first thing I noticed was, this guy wanted to finance the car with two thousand dollars down. Most car deals for old cars like that are cash, so red flags popped for me. The car was old, my regular banks wouldn’t take a deal for it, and when I ran this guy’s credit I knew no one would finance this guy with 100 percent down and the title to his house as collateral. He’d never paid a bill in his life, and didn’t own a house, said he made ten grand a month but couldn’t pay for his bad checks to Round Table Pizza. But he said he had ten grand in savings, so I penciled him back at full retail of twelve grand, added tax and license and sent the write up back with a big red marker showing all of it as down payment and a “special NO finance deal.” The salesman gave me a funny look so I told him there was no way we could finance even ten cents. I figured the guy would blow out.

Instead, my salesman came back with a few thousand dollars more money down, exactly what he’s supposed to do. Now I had five grand down on a twelve thousand dollar car that I owned for about sixty-five hundred, so I kept working the salesman and he kept working the customer. we got up to eight grand down and I went and talked to the guy myself. I really wanted to sell the car but if I sold it for eight grand out the door, we weren’t really making any money, and I was absolutely positive I would start fielding heat calls from the guy as he learned the foibles of owning a twelve-cylinder English car, so if I wasn’t making a lot of money it would be better to not sell it.

In the end, I got ten grand down and did a short term in house finance deal for the balance of $3500. It was a convoluted deal, he had five grand cash in his pocket, so he wrote me a check for the other five grand as his down payment. Of course, he had to transfer funds so he told me to hold the check for a few days. We financed the balance of thirty-five hundred for four months at $850 a month and sent him on his way in his new ride. And I sat in my chair and wondered what I just did. At least I’d made some money, and the damned thing was gone and no longer digging its own hole in the lot.

The next day the owner of the store was going through the weekend deals to count his money and he asked me about the Jaguar deal. He said, “You will be doing the repo when this one goes bad.” We laughed, but not really. I knew I would be going to get the car…probably soon.

The five thousand dollar check bounced. I called and he did the hem and haw shuffle, so I re-iterated my little speech to him about paying for the car or he’d be walking. He drove over a few days later and gave me three grand in cash and promised the rest by the end of the next week. He did get the bad check covered but it took a while and by then his first $850 payment was due and of course, I had to call him and tell him my repossession pitch again and say, again…how I’d bent over backward, broken all my dealership policies, and done him a big favor so he could impress his young girlfriend. And found out the girlfriend had left him and he was sad..and he would send me his payment the next day. We got a check a few days later, it bounced. By the time he got that handled his next payment was past due and I was checking out which truck we had I wanted to use to tow a car dolly to the coast.

He got the second payment paid finally and then it was over. He stopped answering his phone. After thirty days, I drove over to see him in a pick up towing my car dolly. He answered the door, which surprised me, and handed me the keys, which surprised me more, and apologized to me. I told him he only owed me seventeen hundred bucks and he could keep the car. I even told him I’d hold it for a while to allow him to get his money together. He declined. I towed the Jaguar home. I think he figured out the last $1700 bucks was probably gonna cost him thousands and thousands in repair bills.

We made money on the car as it was and I wholesaled the car the next day. So it was a good deal for me, but if I was looking at a Jaguar twelve cylinder convertible today to take in trade, I’d tell them “we are closed.”