GONE TO THE DARKSIDE: WE BOUGHT A DEALERSHIP!

Well, we bought into and are running a Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, Ram (CJDR) store in Sealy, Texas! Brazelton’s South County of Sealy is the name (yes, it’s a mouthful). Our partners in the deal are the South County dealerships in California, one of the top 10 CJDR dealers in the country.

Why?

Buying into a franchise dealership basically allows us to serve you better, mainly on the lending side. The trend in the lending world has been to cut off independent dealers, and we’ve lost all our best lenders over the last couple of years. Unfortunately too many sketchy dealers ruined it for the good ones.  However, if you are tied to a franchise they think you are golden!  So now we have access to more lenders which gives us more lending power and even more competitive rates to pass on to our customers.  It will also speed up our process as well.  As many of you have seen, the process of handling loans went from taking an hour or so to process to taking a couple days (at least).

Some other benefits are access to more pre-owned vehicles through franchise dealer only sales. Of course, this is only to CJDR products, but we sell a lot of used Wranglers and Grand Cherokees.  We’ll also be building up the fleet department and CJDR has a great fleet program. Please let us know if you or any of your friends are looking for a very aggressive fleet program!

What about Brazelton Auto?

Brazelton Auto is still here to help with ALL makes and models with an UNBIASED approach to car buying, though many of you have known we have praised the Grand Cherokees for some time (just ask Lewis’ wife). As mentioned before, we’ll have even better lending potential with both leasing and conventional financing.  Lewis will be splitting his time between Sealy and Brazelton Auto, particularly in the early stages.  Bill will be handling most of the day-to-day management operations at Brazelton Auto.  Hopefully you won’t notice a difference, except that Lewis might be a bit slower returning your call.

So, this is an exciting time for us, and more than a little nerve wracking. There is quite a bit more to running a new car store vs our little operation! We are drinking out of a firehose right now, but we are seeing good progress already.