Repo men cash in big as techs hit slippy patch

The morning we met in the town of Sebastopol in northern California, Mr Brent Doyle was taking a great interest in a story in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. It concerned one of the best-known local e-tail companies, wine.com, which had just gone bankrupt.

"There will be a fall-out from that," he says, referring to the job losses. "I'm not going to get an assignment from it today, but maybe in three or four months."

Mr Doyle is head of Daybreak Auto Recovery and the collapse of another Internet company means the probability of more business for him. Mr Doyle is a repo man. His profession is repossessing cars after drivers have stopped making their monthly payments. For the repo man these are boom times in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, which have taken the brunt of the technology meltdown. A year ago, Daybreak had 100 cars on its list. Now it has about 200.

"It started in June/July last year after the Nasdaq peaked," says Mr Doyle as we sip black coffee in a diner. "For the next year-and-a-half I'm going to be extremely busy."

Before that, during the free-spending euphoria of the tech boom, times were tough for the repossession business, he says.

But this period produced a generation of young people who believe they are entitled to their Porsche 911 or Ford Explorer as a right, and who still cling to that sense of entitlement even after losing their jobs and seeing their stock portfolios turn to dust.

These days, Mr Doyle and the seven other Daybreak repo men repossess more than 300 cars a month, compared to 20 to 30 a year ago. Several cars have been picked up from former employees of big tech companies like Cisco and Intel, some even in the company parking lots.

"New loans now go bad very quickly," he says. "It used to be very rare but I see more first-payment defaulters. It's either fraud or someone bought a car and lost their job in the same month."

There are also more fancy automobiles coming up on his list than before. Daybreak, which was recently acquired by Internet service provider Advanced Wireless Systems as a profit-making component, has recently repossessed three Ferraris, prising them from owners who regarded the Italian-made motor "as if it was their kid".

They have also chased up a number of Jaguars and Porches (pronounced `Porchays' in California). Volvos rarely figure as the Swedish car tends to be driven by "safe, conservative" people.

"Popping" a car, as it is known in repo jargon, is a tricky business - best done when things are quiet.

"I try to do a repossession with dignity and we do it at night so as not to embarrass people in front of the neighbour. Daybreak is the best time. That's when we do our best work. That's when people sleep the hardest."

But the problem is often finding the cars. Of defaulters, 50 per cent try everything to hide their automobiles, parking in a friend's driveway or lock-up garage, or several streets away from home. Some change their addresses when hard times hit.

"If they live with parents or friends they are very hard to find," says Mr Doyle, who has logged 6,000 "pops" in a career spanning 15 years.

"But people have to apply for something, somewhere, sooner or later," he says, and their details get entered into a computer. He once "popped" a car this way after it had been valet-parked at a hotel by a couple on the first night of their honeymoon.

Mr Doyle does a lot of the "skip" work himself, trawling through data banks and field contacts to find clues to people's whereabouts, and sometimes he has to do the old-fashioned legwork, knocking on doors to elicit information from neighbours. It's a lot of effort for only $300 (€354) a car, though it can be three times that for a Ferrari.

When on the prowl, the repo men cruise around in innocuous-looking white pick-up trucks, checking the parking lots of restaurants, shopping malls and companies, or driveways in quiet boulevards in Silicon Valley's affluent neighbourhoods.

Popping a car today is a high-tech affair, not at all like the hot-wiring done by the protagonist Bud in the 1984 cult movie Repo Man in which he repossesses a 1964 Chevy Malibu with three dead aliens in the boot. Hot-rodding a new Lexus or Mercedes is not an option as "most new cars have a chip in the key which could have one of three billion codes", explains Mr Doyle, an athletic figure with neat moustache and wraparound sun-glasses, who is also a licensed private investigator.

Nor is there any need for hot-rodding. Each of his trucks is equipped with a Dynamic 601b, a self-loading boom that extends two clamps by remote control under the front wheels to tow the car away. This process is known as "grip and rip". A well-executed grip and rip can be done in seven seconds without the repo man getting out of the cab.

"It's like the end of a treasure hunt," says Mr Doyle, describing his feelings when a car is `popped'. "It's the best part of the job. There's an incredible rush, my heart beats so fast I think the whole neighbourhood can hear it."

He treats it as a job that has to be done but has some sympathy for the victims. "I'm concerned about mothers with children and the elderly," he says. "If we see a Dodge Caravan with four car seats [for children] we'll knock on the door" to give the mother a chance to take her things, or pay up and get the car back. But this can backfire. Once a parent pushed her children into the car and he had to leave as repo men may not confiscate a vehicle with anyone inside.

Naturally, people who see their automobile about to be taken away get very upset.

"The first reaction is usually shock," he says. "They ask, `what can I do to get it back?' I've heard every story, like `the cheque is in the mail', to which I say, `OK let's get the client [the bank] on the line'. Sometimes it's total chaos with screaming and yelling, or sometimes it's - `what took you so long'?" A few times people offered him bribes or sex, he adds.

It can be dangerous too. Mr Doyle recalls "popping" a Mustang in a woman's car port. "The boyfriend came out, naked, he was on drugs, he pointed a 45 Magnum and screamed `Put the car down' - which we did. No car is worth a bullet. We called the police and got the car anyway." In tense situations like this, Daybreak repo men are trained not to raise their voices but to speak in a courteous "non-threatening monotone".

Riders of Harley Davison motorcycles can also be aggressively tenacious about their machines. Mr Doyle spent a lot of time trying to locate a Harley in the possession of a tattooed biker in Santa Rosa called Belvin Snake.

"He was a snake. I'll never forget him. I hassled him so much he said, `Come and get it'. I found it dismantled and hidden in boxes in his trailer."

Mr Doyle blames the easy-credit culture for encouraging people to live beyond their means. When he started in the business it was not so easy to get a loan. In recent years, however, cash flowed and consumer demand soared. It was simple for a 20-year-old to get a top-of-the-line model.

"There was so much money flooding the market and so much competition to get that consumer dollar, it put pressure on people to buy an SUV [sports utility vehicle]. They thought - the Millers have bought a new SUV, look how good it looks in their driveway, let's get one.

"Even someone with real bad credit can get their ma or pa to make a `straw buy'," he says. Small credit companies especially went for bad risks "because the return could be as high as 21.7 per cent, so $3,800 could become $9,000" before the loan is repaid.

Despite all the best efforts of Daybreak and other repo companies in the area, Mr Doyle believes that 30 per cent of cars due for repossession are never found, and the banks or car dealerships eventually write them off. People just disappear with them.

"There's lots of rolling stones out there," he says.