Dealership facility upgrades are a constant point of contention between factories and dealers. Factories can impose a wide range of facility demands, ranging from light brand image or signage updating, to complete facility refurbishment, rebuild, or even relocation. Dealers view many such requests as onerous and/or unlikely to provide any boost to sales.

The U.S. auto retail sector has in recent years seen a growing number of foreign firms and individuals seeking to acquire dealerships here. Meanwhile, U.S. dealership groups are also starting to look across the border for acquisitions.

The CPAs from Rosenfield & Company, PLLC were recently approached by a small group who own a very successful dealership group in India that are looking to acquire dealerships here in the U.S. It is an indication of how foreign investors from near and far are eyeing the U.S. auto retail market as a lucrative investment opportunity.

Dalton Corporation, headquartered in Guadalajara, Mexico, recently acquired its first automotive franchises in the U.S. Dalton’s vice president of innovation and new ventures Juan Carlos Rodriguez Villava spoke with Getting to GO! about Dalton’s U.S. expansion plans and the importance of working with a law firm with experience in cross-border transactions.

In today’s unique market, many dealers are considering their buy-sell options. Getting a sense of the value of the business is the typical starting point. Brokers and investment bankers who focus on dealership transactions are quick to point to rules of thumb, especially the earnings multiplied by a multiple, where the multiple is based entirely on the franchise represented by the dealer. But this approach alone does not account for the wide variety of variables that are involved, nor does it deal with dealership real estate. While the earnings-times-multiple approach provides a quick gauge of value, both sides of this mathematical equation deserve some further attention.

The deposit is a standard and integral term in buy-sell agreements, whether in an asset purchase agreement (an “APA”) or stock purchase agreement. The focus here will be APAs, since they are used for the vast majority of automobile dealership buy-sells.

We explore some of the legal and deal considerations that buyers and sellers face in dealing with various types of acquisition financing in this article, originally published in Automotive Buy Sell Report.

In a simple asset purchase agreement (an “APA”), a seller makes warranties about assets, a buyer purchases them, and if the warranties turn out to be inaccurate, the buyer’s main recourse is to collect damages from the seller. However, in the sale of an existing dealership business, where the selling entity often exits the business and may even dissolve shortly after a sale, a buyer may worry that the entity and its owners have less incentive to stand behind their representations regarding the assets and operations of the business. The risks of purchasing the operating assets of an existing dealership are numerous and difficult to estimate: the fixtures, equipment, inventory, and any real estate purchased may have unknown and costly problems, the prior dealer’s employment policies and practices could be non-compliant, and there may be unknown claims resulting from questionable prior customer dealings that have not yet come to light.

Back when service loaner vehicles were an uncommon perk, parties to a buy-sell agreement may have simply treated them as “used vehicles” without any thought as to how to calculate their value. But now that service loaners are increasingly necessary under factory margin programs, or simply to offer competitive customer service, it is worth carefully considering how to address them when a dealership is sold.

Dealership asset sales commonly involve the termination by the seller of its employees at closing and the rehiring of the employees by the buyer. Depending on the number of affected employees, both federal and California law may impose prior notification requirements on the seller, failing which the seller could be hit with substantial financial damages and penalties.