A couple of years ago, Jeff Spreen was talking to brokers about acquiring another dealership in the Inland Empire region in Southern California. One of them asked him what Spreen thought about the Mazda brand. He didn’t think about it at all, Spreen replied.
There was Mazda store in the area for sale, however. Meanwhile, Spreen had a Saturn dealership building in Loma Linda, Calif, that had been empty since 2008.
After doing some homework on the Mazda brand, Spreen decided it was a good fit. But the price was “something crazy,” more than $1 million, says Spreen. So he called Mazda. Turns out the manufacturer had been trying to find a buyer for the franchise, in Redlands, Calif., for several years.
“Mazda came down two days later. They said, ‘this Saturn store is better than 80 percent of the dealerships we have,’” Spreen tells Automotive Buy Sell Report. “Let’s figure this out.”
Spreen Mazda is now open in the former Saturn facility and Jeff Spreen is looking to add to his two-franchise group. He figures being a family-owned operation makes him a preferred buyer.
Jeff Spreen, owner of Spreen Mazda
“This market is very cutthroat,” he says. “One of the things I always tell people is that corporations [who own dealerships] roll things out slower. We are like a speed boat, not a cruise ship.”
The Mazda deal took about six months to work out, says Spreen. The franchise, formerly known as Redlands Mazda and owned by Tom Bell, was officially acquired around 18 months ago.
Spreen then moved it to the former Saturn facility in Loma Linda, Calif. That store is right on the freeway, and had been empty since the Saturn franchise closed in 2008. He spent around $400,000 sprucing the facility up, and Spreen Mazda opened late last year.
The Inland Empire includes Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. The median household income in those areas is around $55,000.
Mazda is the “perfect car for this market,” says Spreen.
He figures it pairs well with Spreen Honda, his other dealership, also in Loma Linda. “They advertise really well next to each other,” says Spreen.
Plus, Spreen can now achieve some economies of scale with employees and vendors.
The Honda store sells around 100 used and 350 new cars a month. At the Mazda store, Spreen aims to sell, conservatively, 1,100 units a year, he says. The group will sell between 4,500 and 6,500 a year, says Spreen.
At a recent Mazda dealers meeting, Spreen was impressed with the passion his fellow dealers felt for the brand. He seems to have caught some of that fever. Spreen praises Mazda’s decision to stick with a four-cylinder engine across the product line, turbo-charging instead of adding more cylinders.
“I think Mazda has one of the best products,” says Spreen.
The former dealership owner didn’t do a lot of advertising around the brand, he says. Indeed, it was attached to another dealership in the Redlands Auto Plaza. Spreen is doing “a little bit of everything” as far as advertising, he says.
In the first three months of this year sales have risen by 20 or 30 percent each month. That’s icing on the cake for a building that wasn’t even being used and for which Spreen was carrying the rent and utilities expenses.
Jeff Spreen, 36, is a third-generation car dealer. His grandfather owned a Cadillac store and his father ran the Honda store and several Saturn stores. It’s too soon to know if the fourth generation will go into the family business – Jeff Spreen’s kids are three years and two months old.
He is looking to expand into other brands. Another Honda store would be nice, and he likes the other Asian imports too, says Spreen. He is interested in domestics, if they are fast-movers. “I’m more used to a fast-paced store,” he says.
