A dealership contract is the best thing that can happen to a recon business and the fastest way to go broke, and which one you get is usually decided before the first unit arrives.
The appeal is obvious: volume, predictability, and somebody else doing the marketing. The risk is equally obvious once you've lived it — you've handed a large share of your capacity to one customer who pays in sixty days, sets the deadlines, and can end the arrangement with a phone call.
Most of the pain is avoidable. Here's what to settle in writing first.
1. Who exactly is the customer
Not "the dealership". A specific person, with a specific title, who has authority to approve work and pricing.
Lot managers change. Used car managers change more. If your agreement lives in the head of one guy who leaves in March, you'll spend April explaining your own prices to a stranger who thinks they're high.
Get the business entity, the billing contact and the operational contact written down separately, because they're rarely the same person and only one of them pays you.
2. Turnaround, in hours, from a defined start
"Same day" means nothing. Same day from when — from when the unit is dropped, from when you're notified, from when the keys actually appear?
Define the clock: turnaround begins when the vehicle and keys are both in our possession and the work order is submitted. Anything else and you'll be held to a deadline that started while the car was still on the transport truck.
And state what happens on a miss, in both directions. A dealer who is late giving you the car doesn't get to keep the original deadline.
3. What "recon" actually includes
This is where most money is lost. Write a service list with explicit inclusions and exclusions.
- Is engine bay cleaning in the standard package or extra?
- Is odour removal included, or is it a separate charge when the car arrives smelling of smoke?
- Do you pull badges? Remove dealer decals from the previous store?
- Is headlight restoration in the base price?
- What about a car that needs a two-stage correction — is that priced as recon or as a separate authorisation?
A package that says "full detail" will be interpreted by the dealer as "whatever it needs" and by you as "the standard hour and a half". Both readings are reasonable, which is why it has to be written down.
4. The damage and liability line
You will, eventually, be blamed for a scratch that was already there.
Two protections. First, photograph every unit on intake — all four corners, wheels, interior, and any existing damage, before you touch it. Second, get a written clause on what happens when damage is alleged: who inspects, within what window, and what the resolution process is.
A dealer who won't put a damage process in writing is telling you something.
5. Price changes and the review date
Your costs go up. Chemical prices go up. Wages certainly go up. A contract with no review mechanism is a contract that quietly gets worse every year.
Put in an annual review date, or better, a clause tying a review to a defined trigger — a stated percentage change in your input costs, or simply "either party may request a pricing review with 30 days' notice."
Without this you'll be doing 2026 work at 2024 prices in 2027, which is how a good contract becomes the reason you can't pay your techs properly.
6. Volume: expected, not guaranteed — and what happens either way
Dealers will talk about volume. Get it written as an expectation, and get the consequences of missing it in both directions.
If they promise forty units a month and send twelve, you've staffed for forty. If they send eighty, you've got a queue and a retail business you can no longer serve. Neither is their problem unless you make it one.
Practical version: a monthly minimum below which pricing reverts to your standard rate, and a stated maximum capacity above which you're entitled to decline or schedule out.
7. Payment terms, and what they really mean
Net 30 usually means 45. Net 60 usually means "when the accounting person gets to it".
Ask three questions: what are the stated terms, what is the actual average, and who do I call when an invoice is late. Then decide whether you can float that much work. A shop doing $18,000 a month with a dealer on net 60 needs roughly $36,000 of working capital permanently tied up in that one relationship.
Also settle the mechanics: do they need a PO number on every unit? Do they want one invoice a month or one per car? Does their system need the VIN, the stock number, or both?
Getting this wrong is the single most common reason recon invoices sit unpaid — not disputes, just a missing PO number bouncing the invoice out of their system silently.
8. Who submits the work, and how
If the process is "the lot guy texts you a photo of a VIN", you will lose units. Not maybe — you will.
Give them a defined intake: a form, a link, a shared sheet, something that captures VIN, stock number, PO, the services requested, and the date the unit needs to be back on the line. Then the deadline is theirs, in their words, on the record.
This is a large part of why Concorso gives each dealership its own order link — the dealer's staff enter the unit against your price book for their account, and it lands on your board as a job with the VIN, the PO and their delivery date already attached. No seat to pay for, and no text message to lose.
9. Your pricing stays yours
If you're doing work for three dealers, they should not have the same rates and they definitely should not see each other's.
Whatever system you use, dealer pricing needs to be per-account. A shared price list is both a commercial mistake and an awkward conversation waiting to happen.
10. Storage and dwell
What happens when a completed unit sits on your lot for nine days because their transport is backed up?
Free storage sounds like goodwill until you're holding six of their cars and can't fit your retail work. Put a dwell allowance in — say three days after completion — and a daily rate after that. You'll almost never charge it. It exists to make the problem visible.
11. How it ends
Notice period, both ways. Thirty days is normal. What matters more is what happens to work in progress and outstanding invoices on the day notice is given — those need to be explicit, because that's the moment goodwill is at its lowest.
The short version
A dealership contract is not a favour they're doing you. It's a commercial arrangement where you're taking on concentration risk, deadline risk and payment-term risk in exchange for volume. Price it accordingly and write it down.
The shops that do well on dealer work aren't the cheapest. They're the ones whose paperwork is so clean that the dealer's accounting department never has a reason to hold an invoice.
Taking dealer work seriously? See how Concorso handles dealership recon — VIN and stock intake, PO numbers on the job, private pricing per dealer and monthly account billing.