I have filed mechanic's liens for something like 50 cars.
Some places have a local service to take care of all of this for you. The guy I used many years ago charged a flat $150/VIN and would do all of the work for me. He would go around to all of the local dealerships and make the same pitch, he would then run all of the public notice ads, send certified letters, run the public auction, and then hand the title to the buyer. It would take three-plus months from when we started until the auction. It is not a fast process.
I was the service manager of a dealer group in this case and all I wanted was the car gone. I had long since written off the repair costs as a bad debt and any money I got would pay the guy who did the leg work and maybe a little left over. Cars abandoned at a repair shop/storage lot are usually not worth much. The car needed a repair (or damaged if it was in our body shop) typically for more than the car was worth and then it sat outside for year. Some were just scrap value at this point. I really don't understand the story about the R8 above. A lien is a lien and nothing more. A lien of $8,000 on a $100,000 car and the guy walked away???? Seriously, there's a huge part of that story that's missing or wrong. I've never seen where it gives you the right to now own a car for a few thousand dollars in bad debt unless the car is valued at the auction amount or less than the lien.
The public auction takes place and if the highest price bid is $10,000 and you have a lien for the repairs and storage (many times that is the largest amount) totaling $7,500, the lien is satisfied and you owe the former owner the balance of $2,500 and the high bidder get the title. If the highest bid is less than your lien, you as the repair shop, are now the highest bidder. You can elect to sell it for less than your lien if you want. To explain the storage, we would look at the repair order date and count the days. Most of the time it was a six months or a year mostly out of procrastination on our part. We had a back section of the lot where we parked these and would forget about them. Each state has a limit on how much you can charge for storage. One year at $30/day is $10,950, at $50/day is $18,250.
saruken said:
Update: The seller does not have a title, but sent me the VIN and a copy of what he is calling a "court order to issue a title to the new buyer". It is a "Report of sale of motor vehicle" that he's filled out by hand, referencing a court case(?) between his business and the original owner. It states that he held a public sale for the required 20 days, but the "buyer" section of the document is blank – This is where my info would go, I guess.
tell him if he gets a clean , non salvage NC title you are interested ,
but thats not going to happen , so look for another car !
Ian F (Forum Supporter) said:
In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :
WTH... what kind of moron buys an R8 and complains about a $4K repair? I guess the type of moron that also lets the shop take it from them... strange...
It had the aluminum subframe crack that had been repaired. My guess is that he bought it at an insurance auction for cheap and had the repair done. You can often find those for well under $20k with the cracks. Fire up the TIG and you have a cheap supercar.
I think we could only get about $10k for it when we sold it because of the salvage title and the repair.
Pete. (l33t FS) said:
In reply to Scott_H :
Auction?
Yes. The state often (every time in my experience) requires there to be a public auction where you sell the vehicle with the lien to the highest bidder. You can be the auctioneer but it has to be advertised as a public notice of a public auction with the vehicle(s) listed that will be auctioned. In my case there were always at least one and sometimes three or four bidders per car and pretty casual. Nowhere near as intense as the storage locker auctions on TV. It would go something like this "Here is this Hyundai (point to it) anybody give me $100?". And off we went. If the auction amount is less than what I had as a lien (see storage fees above), I was the high bidder. That was the case 100% of the time for the cars I was working with. So, the high bid amount does not satisfy the lien so I am the high bidder. I can elect to sell the car to the high bidder and take the loss or I can take ownership of the car and deal with it. I always sold them.
The first auction I did included three old Hyundai Excels. This was maybe 1992?? Two were non-Op and were either parts cars or scrap. The third one was a runner but a real POS. There was one guy who really wanted the third one as those cars were his thing. He offered something like $500 or $600 or some such. I don't recall the specifics but I sold it to him for half of his bid amount but he had to take all three. Deal!
Cars abandoned at dealerships were under one of two scenarios for me. The car was brought in and when the diagnosis was made, it exceeded the value of the car. Essentially the car was a total loss. The customer would decline the repairs and would not pay the diagnostic/tear down fees so it would sit. Second, the car was brought in and needed a higher cost repair. Customer would approve the work, we would complete the work and then they would not pay for or come get the car.
The worst one I get snagged in was for something like $800 or $1,000. Ended up selling the car at the auction to a sweeper/sander/masking tape kid from our body shop for $500. The auction would have gone higher as there was a guy who was bidding against the kid. Everyone there appreciated the kid's enthusiasm in wanting the car and started asking the other bidder to let the kid have it. Bidding stopped and the kid got it. Pretty funny. Three or so months after that auction I got a letter in one of those large envelopes that says "the enclosed letter is being sent to you from an inmate at ABC State Prison". It was from the guy who abandoned the car the body shop kid got telling me he was still going to pay for it and his girlfriend would be contacting me. She did call and I told her the car was gone and sold and there was nothing to be done at this point. Never heard from them again.
Like all of these legal things, it varies from state to state. What ScottH describes is what New Jersey did prior to 1980. After that they made you give the car to the customer if they had paid any amount at all towards the bill. I hear they came back to reality in the mid 1990s, but I was gone from NJ by then.
