Vehicle affordability is at an all-time low. One company thinks it has the solution. It's called LHPH Capital and it stands for Least Here Pay Here. If you haven't heard of the term before, you're in for a fun episode.
I sat down with the CEO of LHPH Capital, Tim Lawrence, and we discussed the rise of Least Here Pay Here programs, innovating consumer payment affordability, economics of a used car lease, subprime consumer health check, and much more.
我与LHPH Capital的首席执行官Tim Lawrence坐下来,我们讨论了最近兴起的Least Here Pay Here(最先租后购)计划、创新的消费者付款能力、二手车租赁经济学、次级消费者的健康状况检查等等。
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So, Tim, tell me, going from marriage counseling to a career in sales, how did this happen?
所以,Tim,告诉我,从婚姻咨询到销售事业,这是怎么发生的?
Well, my father-in-law thought I was crazy to do it, but it was really out of necessity. I was newly married, maybe a year and a half in, starting to build a private practice and marriage and family therapy. We just couldn't really afford our monthly nut.
So, one of my good friends had just gotten into medical device sales and he was in the operating room helping the surgeons. It was really fascinating to me. He was making good money. I just thought, well, at least for now, that could be something to help get us through it, but just table the marriage and family therapy.
I got hired by a company called BioMet, a large organization and was immediately captivated by it. Just loved it, loved the sales side, the education side, and then continued to work my way up to manager, area manager, area vice president and so on. It was great. The rest is history.
But walk me through, today you're running, you're the CEO of large leasing company, a focus on use car space. Couldn't be more of a stark difference from marriage counseling. So, I'm just curious and I understand the driver there, what led you initially to go into marriage counseling? Like why? What was that innate desire? Why did you want to do that?
Yeah. So, originally, I wanted to be a pastor. So I went into college thinking, I'm going to be a pastor and about two years in, I realized that, well, it's really the one-on-one relationships that are the most meaningful. If I can help somebody through a difficult time, then I think I'm adding value to their life. And so, halfway in, I had already had a major in theology, but so I minored in psychology and then after that, did post-graduate in psychology.
So, now, instead of counseling marriages, you're counseling people and leasing cars. Let's go, baby.
所以,现在你不再咨询婚姻问题,而是咨询人们并租赁汽车了。走吧,宝贝。
Yeah, that's right. And, you know, I can't tell you how valuable it's been to me in every part of my business life.
是的,没错。而且你知道,我无法向你形容它在我的商业生活的每个领域中是多么有价值。
Like, how so? Tell me. I'm curious.
像怎样?告诉我。我很好奇。
So, first, I think managing your team, you get all these different personalities and conflicts that come up between personalities and really trying to help coach people through it, not so that I'm the one who's solving the problem for them, but to really help them be empowered to improve their relationship with their peer. So, I think that's a big part. I think also maintaining my cool in certain situations has been really valuable because early on when I was doing MFT stuff, it got pretty heated with couples and families. And I had to learn early on how to just stay cool that you'll figure out a way through this and you'll be able to help them. And so, building that confidence, I think, was really helpful as well.
Yeah, we used to, I remember coming up in the dealership world, we used to have this saying in the dealership called T-Mobile Voice. And if someone, when you're in retail, naturally in retail, you have crazy things that happen. And I remember the first time I discovered that one of our managers was carrying, was strapped, having gone on him. And I was really bizarre. I was like, wait, what? And I was much younger, mind you. But I just remember that. I was like, interesting. I was like, so this is the type of world we're in. And this wasn't in a terrible area or anything, but maybe from where he came from previously. Needless to say, T-Mobile Voice, keep it calm, keep it cool. I like it, keep it cool.
That's what we said. And one other thing I'll mention is, I don't remember where I read this, but someone posted a really interesting article about if you show the customer that you are just as upset, if not more upset than them about somebody that happened to them, they suddenly toned down. They give someone coming in, freaking out at you, something happened. Who knows what? It could be nothing, it could be something big. But regardless, if you give them that feeling back that you take it more seriously than them, suddenly they take a step back to like, okay, whoa, this person gets it. I want to be heard and I'm being heard. Yeah. No, I think that's a really good point that just covers basically all grounds is people really want to feel heard and seen. So if you can do that in your personal or professional life, it's so helpful.
Yeah. So that's lessons from the dealership world. Can you just give us a background on what is Lisa here pay here? What do you guys actually do? What's the business model?
是的。那就是经销商世界的教训。你能给我们介绍一下“Lisa here pay here”是什么背景吗?你们实际上做什么?你们的商业模式是什么?
Yeah. So the Lisa here pay here is essentially an in-house financing product. And it's targeted to a demographic of consumers that have little or poor credit. And that could be based off of any number of life experiences or just lack of building credit and who's not bankable. And so because this consumer has very little options, they'll likely go into a dealership and try to figure out a way to finance the vehicle. The dealership has no other options for them. So the dealer provides the financing themselves. And that's really where the term comes from by here pay here and lease here pay here. You're buying the vehicle there and then you're paying for it there or you're leasing it there and then you're paying for it there. And decades ago, it is really where it came from. And it's the consumer used to come in weekly with their cash payment and give it to the dealership. And then the dealership could take a look at the vehicle and make sure that it was still okay, that you were still breathing and that you would probably be back next week.
Yeah, I mean, up until very recently, I saw dealers advertising weekly payments just to kind of show a low monthly payment. I want to say two really important distinctions for a second and please push back if I'm incorrect here. So the way consumers can, this is a used car lease that consumers can do through a dealership. That is where, that is the spoke. If I want to leverage your program as a consumer, I go to a dealership and that's where I can do a used car lease.
Great. All right. And then the second thing is buy your pay here. Like how is this different from by here pay here? And for anyone that's listening, that's not familiar with the term. And I'm going to assume it's not most people, but buy your pay here, meaning you go to buy a used car or a car from a dealer and they are the lender essentially for one reason or another, the dealer is the lender that is actually financing that loan for you. And you pay your monthly payment to the dealer. So how are you different from just a traditional buy your pay here on the lender side?
So it essentially is the same thing, but we're the intermediary. So we lend money to the dealership so that they can have a lease here pay here program. And the leases that they end up putting out have been financed by us. And that's also our collateral. Most of these dealerships, they don't have the financing themselves to be able to have 500 lease contracts out on the street or 1000 because it costs them the basically the cost of the vehicle each time they're putting a lease contract out. And that's really cash intensive. So that might cost them five million or 10 million dollars. So instead they would borrow a portion of that from us combined with their own money. And then that allows them to be the lender.
Got it. So me as a dealer, you come to me, you put up the money. Do you do the underwriting? I approve your underwriting. And then that's the box that you're going to continue to underwrite on. And that really helps streamline it. So then that gives you the autonomy as a dealership to do the underwriting then and there. And you don't have to make any phone calls to me. There's nothing that I'm going to approve at the time that the consumer is with you. So you can desk a deal a lot faster as long as you know your own criteria and it lands within that box, then it's solely up to you to make that decision based off of that criteria.
All right. So I know my audience. There's two main main questions in people's minds right now. One of them is consumer focused. One of them is dealer focused. All right. Let's start with the consumer focus. Is this detrimental to the consumer? Right? Like is it does this put the consumer in a worse position than they would otherwise be with alone? Like what's the what's the cost benefit here? I think it's totally the opposite. And the reasons are if you're the consumer then by leasing the vehicle you're likely going to have a shorter term which is going to promote a successful transaction the longer the term the more likelihood that you're going to have some sort of mechanical failure that you're responsible for and then that's going to put you in a tougher situation to be able to get back on track to both cover the expenses of the mechanical failure and to maintain your payments. So as a consumer you're essentially test driving the vehicle over the period of the least whether that's 24, 36 or 42 or 48 months and then you get to really know that vehicle. Is this something I want or can I upgrade once this transaction is over? And by having that option it really does help you in both those fronts.
Got it. So when I'm finished with that vehicle I send it back to the dealer then does the dealer have the option then to buy it back or how does that or not buy it back I guess just keep it how does that work?
Yeah. So from the dealer's perspective it's your vehicle you're the owner of it and you've been really renting it out over the course of the contract and so then if you can reassess it is it in good enough condition for me to recycle it and put it back out on the lot and do either a 24 month lease or even shorter lease or should I wholesale it have you know ACV combined pick it up or ship it out to auction.
So the second question that I had in mind that I think you know is going through people's head and it's definitely going through mine is how do you make money and then how do the dealers make money here like give us like the you know give us the nitty gritty of like the economics of how this works.
Yeah. I see smiling. I totally get it. It's my favorite part. Economics I love that. So we make money off of interest and fees because we're the intermediary we're essentially the bank but because this is a higher risk segment we're borrowing a portion of our money from syndication of banks and other financial partners to be able to lend it to the dealer. So because we're here we're able to create really a new niche for dealers who typically wouldn't be able to get financing for a lease or pay your program or a buy your pay your program then we offer the financing to the dealer and it's going to have a little bit more of a margin in it than if you were borrowing directly from let's say Wells Fargo and that's because that's how we're able to stay in business and create that longer term continuity for you as the dealer and then when you're the dealer so the way that our program works is you're you're essentially borrowing on the cost of the vehicle let's say the cost is $10,000 and you put a thousand reconditioning so that's $11,000 and we set up a principal and interest amortizing alone with you on that cost down to zero over the same term as the lease so let's say it's 42 months we're going to amortize $11,000 down to zero over that 42 months and you put out a 42 month lease with your consumer your payment to us let's say it's $250 a month and you're collecting $450 from your consumer because you put in a warranty and you're going to make sure that that vehicle runs so as you collect. that $450 you then pay us that $250 and you have that cash cushion spread of operating cash for you while you're paying down the vehicle with us it creates an asset for you that you can then either sell or recycle later.
Got it so I got so I basically I get a dividend but I'm not I'm not getting that like upfront windfall of like you know a three grand deal or whatever maybe I'm just not getting got it. I'd have to imagine how many dealers do you work with I mean are you nationwide? We are we're in 17 states right now happy to enter new states as well. So you're looking to expand what are you seeing right now this is I'm just curious about you know what you're able to see in terms of performance what are you seeing from a consumer perspective right now are you seeing an uptick in you know vehicles being repossessed or like what are these like trends that you're seeing right there happening? Yeah seeing very slight increase in repossessions but here's what's on my mind is we haven't really seen delinquency get worse all that much and in our portfolio with our dealers but I'm anticipating that that it will this quarter and before tax season so I'm really curious if it's going to continue to deteriorate as a lot of the other subprime data is showing. I think we expect delinquencies to get worse but we haven't seen it yet we're just basically a pre pandemic levels and what's how is this going to play out. I can't imagine that it wouldn't get worse based off of inflation and consumer savings decreasing there's just less cash available to be able to support all of these auto payments. When you say you haven't seen it get worse do you mean you haven't seen it get worse than 2019 levels or do you mean it hasn't been getting worse than 2021 levels. Over the last 12 months it hasn't gotten worse and it seems like we're at about where we were in 2019.
How do you think about EVs putting numbers on right now especially EVs this year have seen massive volatility. How are you working through that how are you navigating that landscape it seems like many dealers I'm speaking with are really struggling with just forecasting given the volatility and frankly I mean it's to be expected we're still at like their early point of adoption cycle for electric vehicles so it doesn't surprise me that we're kind of you know hitting some bumps in the road and some volatility needless to say though I mean people have to respond to that like how are you handling that.
We're fortunate enough to where we there's really not that much EV penetration in this market market segment but I think no doubt it's going to eventually reach this remarketing segment I mean the target ACB for dealers in this type of program are usually in between 8,000 and 14,000 from auction that would make a retail price probably in the 16,000 to 20,000 and so there's not a lot of EVs that would reach that at this point because they've been so expensive in the past and there's just not that long of a like of a life cycle yet for these EVs to reach there.
Got it so and that makes sense I mean subprime it's definitely not I don't know the exact percentage but definitely not much penetration of EVs and subprime market. The interesting thing with EVs is that it sure seems like they're going to be economical at some point just because of the way that S curves work and really what Tesla's done to the EV market and if they're gonna end up being successful with their $25,000 economical model if EVs really can last that 500,000 to a million miles then it sure is gonna make a lot of sense to have a lot of EVs and in subprime especially if you're a dealer who has at least your pay here program you want vehicles that are gonna last longer because it becomes an asset for you longer than as you said getting a dividend or an annuity payment from.
How have you been able to like break into the market you know given I always think about like our industry has such tight margins right and like it's a it's a pretty big proposition to ask a dealer hey don't make you know whatever three grand up front today rather wait make more but it's gonna be over three years. How do you like cross that how do you cross that chasm what do you do?
Yeah so I think there's two parts to this the first is through education when I first started not that many people knew what least your pay here was or subprime leasing however you want to characterize it and we made a big focus from the beginning on education so if you look at our website we have tons of information we do annual conferences we try to get in with speakers at conferences so that we can help educate people on the benefits and really what it is so that was the first part is just creating that awareness of what this in-house financing product is.
The second part is that it's really been other dealers that successes their successes have been able to illustrate that for us because it's great if you can get two thousand three thousand a copy on the short term but if that same vehicle can earn you ten thousand or fifteen thousand over the life of its cycle then that can that can make you quite a bit of money if your portfolio is five hundred leases a thousand leases three thousand leases now all of a sudden as a dealership you're both dealer and lender and so it's it's really just adding in a new segment to your business as long as you do it well and and look at it as an actual lender then you could have pretty good success.
I got to ask like are you guys did you guys pioneer this model I mean who else who else is doing this exact model in the market.
我得问一问,你们是不是开创了这个模式?我是说市场上还有谁在做和这个完全相同的模式。
So we didn't dealerships have been doing leasing it's just have been a very small small margin of dealers but maybe for the last 20 years there have been dealers doing lease here pay here maybe 30 years but what we did was we helped commercialize it more so that it's more accessible to dealers that otherwise wouldn't have this the ability to get capital like this so some of the larger dealers previously worked with like Wells Fargo to get their financing or a large regional bank and but for the normal dealer it wasn't accessible.
What are that what are the actual economics for the dealer when it's all said and done like what what's the IRR on the loan over three years you know when it's all said and done like what are you seeing what is the average. We typically see a dealer making eight to ten thousand on each vehicle over the span of the vehicle's life so it's that's about five years I think give or take. I'm curious how it how it stacks up as just an investment in a portfolio period.
Yeah it's going to vary by dealer because there there are so many variables to this depending on the ACB of the vehicle. So if the ACB of the vehicle is higher ACB and the dealership has the infrastructure to have a really good service center and they're adding. on a warranty and maybe let's say that they're through the warranty they have their own captive reinsurance company then the internal rate of return is going to be much higher for that dealer because they're they're able to keep that vehicle out on the street longer they have the service ability to maintain that annuity and then they're also on the back end getting the reinsurance money that has its own tax benefits.
Yeah so you mentioned service how does how does all this play into to this model. Well look for consumers for dealers like who's accountable for service here. So if you're the consumer and it's not in your lease contract then it's just like as if you bought the vehicle and you're responsible for it a lot of our dealers add in warranty into the lease contract and the unique thing about a lease is that you if it's part of your program from a dealership standpoint you can just put the warranty as part of the rent charge because as long as you do it consistently across the board and it's not one of the ancillary products that's an add-in. So it's different if you offer it after the fact then it's an ancillary product. If it's part of your program and it's on every vehicle and every lease contract then then the warranty is there and what what that does if you have your own service center is it it really does increase the likelihood of it going to term and it increases the likelihood of you being able to recycle those vehicles again and again.
How do you think about given that how do you think about like your business and you know I don't know how closely been following just but like that you know there I want to say that there's no new cars that were sold in the last quarter transacted below 20k right like the affordability is like a serious crisis and anyway so when you think about this right like I have to imagine this presents an opportunity for you right but like do you do you think that you know are we just headed to a point where you know there's that saying all over twitter you won't own anything you'll be happy or however that goes like is that the world we're in like because affordability is just so out of touch like how do you how do you just balance that with the fact that you know new cars I mean you can't even get anything under 20k anymore realistically.
Yeah I think there has to be a tipping point at some at some level and I think organizations like Tesla are going to have a big advantage to that because the more efficient that the OEMs are like Tesla they can produce vehicles that cost a lot less which is going to meet that market demand that has really been abandoned or put on the shelf as of right now and the impact of that is making things harder on the use car market because it keeps the level of the prices a little bit elevated because there's less newer cars and same for affordability it's like back in during the financial crisis in 2009 was the least amount of new cars that were manufactured and what that did by 2017 and 2018 is it made it so much harder for dealerships like the ones that we finance to acquire inventory that was actually valuable because those were the there was the most scarcity during those years and so it meant that those vehicles that they were targeting were overpriced for the actual value that they were providing to the consumers so it'll be interesting to see what happens in the next five to ten years based off of what's happened through covid and manufacturing but back to OEMs and these lower these lower cost markets I think that this is like a Tony Siba thing I don't know if you follow him or not so Tony Siba is a is a futurist he's he is all about technology and electric vehicles and autonomous electric vehicles and so we we brought him into our office as a consultant to get his his thoughts as we're trying to game plan our next five to ten years and what he said was that based off of how economic S-curves work is electric vehicles are no doubt going to be a huge disruptor to ice vehicles purely based on economics because if those vehicles do actually last 500,000 and 1 million miles and they cost less because there's only 200 working parts in an in an EV motor versus 2000 to we want 1 million miles 1 million 1 million is this the theory out there this is the this is the theory out there I think Tesla is probably the only manufacturer that could produce a vehicle like that at this point but if let's say Tesla does produce their economic $25,000 vehicle that can make it 500,000 to a million miles that's going to be a game changer on this market segment yeah
I mean when I think a million miles to we used to call it the rollover at you know the auctions I mean used to see like like a work van and this was like a it was very rare where you would see it again the millions you know pushing it but you'd see like 500,000, 600,000 on some like crazy work van that I haven't heard that one yet so that's that's pretty aggressive so did he say anything else he did but I'm going to hold that close to the best because we we paid him as a consultant to come down it was very valuable I think if you haven't read any of his works or seen his docs check him out he's got millions of followers he's great yeah now the only thing I'm reading nowadays is Dr. Seuss to my daughter at 7 p.m. every night so and do you remember Ized yet? not quite not quite no I'll be honest I did I did just buy a Kindle though I'm trying because you know at night trying to embed with that little like backlight which is pretty nice so trying to get back into that groove but definitely definitely on the children's book scry now things I hear you I love it
I did want to ask you about interest rates you know you obviously work with the capital markets some extent you're raising money to lend it how is that like impacting your business and how is it impacting consumers is it just as simple as they're paying a higher payment or are you seeing anything else when it comes to conversions and actual adoption of this product at dealerships yeah actually it's made it a lot harder in general because we on the borrowing side we all borrow at variable rates and those variable rates are a lot higher based off of the Fed increasing rates and because they shot up so quickly it really put a heavy burden on organizations like us but really at the dealership level because they were watching their cost of capital double and it really compressed their margins and in this demographic for the consumer there's only a certain payment that is tolerable before you're just setting somebody up to fail so the dealers really had to combat the supply chain issues the inflation issues on vehicles and parts the the labor costs that they've been incurring that are higher along with interest rates so they've had to get really creative on how to reduce expenses on their end so that they can afford to keep their program going while also keeping an affordable payment for the consumer and I think that's one of the other reasons why leasing has gained in popularity for this specific demographic of consumer is because it makes it more affordable the the payment for the quality of vehicle that you can get with a shorter term yeah so you're pretty much saying as these rates have risen they're pretty much the cars.
dealers have had on the road their payments on those vehicles has risen as well it had to yeah I mean it doesn't surprise me I you know I can imagine though that now is probably a better time to enter the spaces of dealer given the fact that you know we're unlikely to see rates rise as much as they've risen last two years again not saying can't happen anything can happen but it's less likely yeah I think you're right because if you based your business model off of what rates were in 2017 and weren't able to accommodate that that swift increase but today you're building your model around what the cost of capital is and what you believe your consumer can tolerate as a payment that's you know bearable to the market then it's going to be more successful
do you think that like use car leasing in general you think this is ever going to go mainstream like do you think we're going to see it with you know prime customers and not just in like the subprime segment or do you think it's really like a payment thing for low-income consumers or what's your thoughts there I think that it's easy for the subprime deep subprime segment because vehicles typically have already depreciated quite a bit and so it's not having that drastic depreciation over the life of the vehicle to where you're you may not be able to predict the residual value because that's sort of the concern for dealers or lenders and use car leasing is what how close am I going to be at the targeted residual value in three years and so if you're if you're able to do that with this this market segment that has used cars that are a little bit older it's easier however I think based off of data and generative AI that it's going to increase the likelihood of used car leasing throughout the credit spectrum instead of it just being super prime and just being subprime and deep subprime it's going to help fill in the gaps because there's going to be better predictive models and if you can do that based off of those predictive models then there's a huge market opportunity a lot of people want to lease cars they just can't yeah I mean like I said it's never really been like a hot thing used car industry to begin with for for one reason or another it's um you know I've heard of leasing programs for years. and I definitely know the hundred dollars a week by here payer you're talking about but it's interesting to see that you know it makes me wonder is this an area that you know it's going to get increased adoption given where affordability is at interest rates and just you know the prices of cars I'm with you Tim
if anyone wants to learn more about yourself lhph like working to go to learn more so our website is easy it's lhph.com you can look through all of our information there you can reach out to us or you can email me t lorence at lhph.com spine and I'll get you to the right person on our team for whatever you're looking for appreciate that any any last words for the audience for for a wrap up hang in there through this tumultuous time in the market um for this turbulent time I think there's a lot of opportunity to be had and in any crisis there is opportunity so let's go find it together
look at that very inspiring all right my friend Tim Lawrence thanks for coming on to the pod really appreciate it and thanks for sharing all your insight super interesting. thanks for having me all right hope you enjoyed that episode please give the podcast a rating consider subscribing to the show and check the show notes for links to what we talked about thanks for tuning in I'll see you guys next time