Dealers looking to expand services could benefit from adding a repair shop, one consultant said.
In an on-demand session at the RVDA Virtual Convention/Expo titled “Crash! Online RV Damage Repair Estimating,” TLY Consulting President Tony Yerman touted financial benefits from entering the damage repair field.
“Damage repair, collisions, storms, vandalism, can be quite lucrative,” he said. “You have insurance customers; you have your regular customers. Your regular customers will bring you vehicles, insurance companies will recommend people to you. So, you have several customers you create from this.”
Yerman said insurance companies can boost dealers’ traffic and business through referrals.
“It builds clientele as well,” he said. “You have insurance companies that will bring people from out of town, people in your area that have accidents, they bring them to your dealer and you literally get a new customer. If it’s a total loss case you could have the opportunity to sell the people a new vehicle.”
Entering damage repair is not cheap. Yerman detailed the investments a dealer would need to make when considering adding a repair shop.
“You need to have a designated shop area. You need a mixing station for paint, especially if you’re going to do full-body paints, and you need a paint booth. And that gets pretty expensive,” he said. “You also get the EPA involved in it because there are environmental issues when it comes to the solvents, the paint, the chemicals that are used with it. The paint booth can be the most expensive part of it because you need a good-sized one to get some of today’s motor homes into it.”
However, he said there are different repair shop levels, and dealers who do not want to take on the time and money involved with a full repair shop can offer services in a different way.
“There are different levels of repair. People who sell trailers can do just sheet metal replacement, which doesn’t require as much work,” Yerman said. “There’s not fiberglass repair, there’s not body fillers and the dust it creates. So that’s a little bit easier.”
Dealers which want to consider moving into the repair shop business have a tool marketed through RVDA called the RV Damage Repair Estimator Manual. The manual has been produced since 1984, and an online version of it now is available at www.drestimation.com.
The online estimator is a monthly subscription service. The estimator is a platform which helps dealers create estimates.
“Insurance companies like to see as complete and itemized an estimate as you can give them,” Yerman said. “The less questions they have to ask the better they like it, the faster you’ll get the estimate approved.”
