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As for cars, which are still the most frequently recovered item, Leleu says his company is seizing as many as 160 a month, up from 100 a month last year. He has two agents earning as much as $2,000 a week, or between $65 and $100 per car. ARB Las Vegas charges creditors an average of $300 and $325 for a repossession and an additional $125 to $150 for the vehicle's keys.
That increase in volume isn't exclusive to Leleu's region, either. He says he has met with other recovery agents from across the country, and they've reported the same -- from Oklahoma to Virginia, Colorado to Florida.
It's nothing personal.
Just ask Bill Bartmann. This former Forbes billionaire took out a $13,000 bank loan in the mid-1980s to start a debt-collection agency with his wife. The now-defunct company, Commercial Financial Services, eventually went public, and at its peak had a market capitalization of $3.5 billion and annual revenue of $1 billion.
"It was a business, and they owed the money," Bartmann says. At the same time, he expresses empathy for those in debt, since he once stood in those shoes.
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"They had enjoyed the fruits of the expenditure or whatever it was, and I was trying to help them resolve their obligations."
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Bartmann says he had a special approach to a business that often relied on phone calls that were either ignored or never returned. He soon learned that 90% of people wanted to pay their debts but could only afford to pay about six of the 10 bills they had. His business goal was to be one of the six that got paid.
If he had to do it all over again, he says, this is the market in which he'd want to be doing it.
This article was reported and written by Matthew Kirdahy for Forbes.com.
Published May 15, 2008
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